by Leigh Dodds
| this article features in Nodalities Magazine, issue 6

As we start to move past the current boot-strapping phase of the semantic web in which we are constructing the web of linked data, its useful to begin discussing what other feature and infrastructure we need in order to support sustainable usage of this huge and growing data set: what services can be offered over linked data? Do we need to consider how to provide quality of service, stability and longevity to the data, or does the sheer scale of the web make these moot points?

In order to answer this question it’s useful to compare the ongoing development of the linked data web with that of the web itself.

A Brief History Lesson

There have been several phases of activity in the development of the web. While in truth, these phases were of different duration, overlapped with one another, and have happened at different rates within different communities, essentially we have gone with the following basic steps.

Firstly we concentrated on just getting stuff on line. The early web was a new medium for document and data exchange and so was at its core a simple publishing device used as a collaborative space between small communities. But as the amount of content and the size and breadth of those communities grew, the emphasis shifted towards linking: tying content together to create, – initially hand-crafted – indexes of the web and knit the available content into a greater whole.

The second, manual linking phase was quickly supplemented by a third phase of automated linking between content: search engines. A search engine is simply a way to quickly create a link-base based on some search criteria. The crawling and indexing of the document web by web crawlers allows users to quickly construct links to content of potential interest.

The third phase of the web’s development has been triggered by the commoditisation of search and the need for search engines to differentiate themselves and offer additional value-added services. Search engine features are now tailored towards particular uses or types of content (Google Image Search; Google Scholar); offer value-added features that capitalise on the ability for search engines to analyse the structure and traffic flows across the web (PageRank and similar indexing improvements; Google Trends); expanding the audience for content (Google Translate); and enabling community-driven customisation of the search experience (Google Custom Search; Yahoo Search Monkey, etc).

No doubt there will be subsequent phases of development, and the perspective of history will let us tease out common strands of development some of which will already be happening. But if we look at the recent, rapid development of the linked data cloud, we can already see that the same pattern is being repeated.

History Recapitulated

There has been RDF data available on the web for many years, used by a limited community of researchers. This slow accumulation of content – echoing the first phase of content publishing on the document web – has been replaced by a rapid increase in data publishing encouraged through the Linking Open Data (LOD) project. By providing clear pragmatic guidance and instructions on how to publish data for the semantic web, that project has enabled us to accelerate our transition through that first content publishing phase. But it has also, crucially, encouraged the linking together of data sets (Phase 2).

This linking has to a great extent been manual. Not in the sense that members of the LOD community are manually entering data to link datasets together, but rather at the level of looking for opportunities to link together datasets, encouraging data publishers to co-ordinate and inter-relate their data, and by attempting to organically grow the link data web by targeting datasets that would usefully annotate or extend the current Linked Data Cloud.

The rapid growth of the Linked Data Cloud means that this “manual” phase will soon be over: there will be sufficient momentum behind the semantic web that increasing amounts of data will become available and no single community will be able (or need) to shepherd its development. The focus will shift towards the subject specific communities who will instead co-ordinate at a more local level. Semantic web search engines will also become a reality.

Semantic Web search engines need to be distinguished from semantically enabled search engines. The latter use techniques like natural language parsing and improved understanding of document semantics in order to provide an improved search experience for humans. A Semantic Web search engine should offer infrastructure for machines. This Third Phase is also beginning to take place. Simple semantic web search engines like Swoogle and Sindice provide a way to for machines to construct link bases, based on some simple expressions of what data is of relevance, in order to find data that is of interest to a particular user, community, or within the context of a particular application. And crucially this can be done without having to always crawl or navigate over the entire linked data web. This process can be commoditised just as it has with the web of documents.

Co-Evolution of the Web Infrastructure

Given the strong concordance between the phases of development of the document and linked data web, it is reasonable to make some predictions on how semantic web search engines, and additional supporting infrastructure, is likely to evolve by comparing them with the development of human search engines. For each of the specialisations and value-added features listed earlier its possible to see an equivalent for the machine-readable web:

These last two are particularly interesting as they suggest the need to be able to easily aggregate, combine and analyse aspects of the linked data cloud. This infrastructure will need to be able to support the community in working with data in a variety of ways, allowing data to flow and be collected where it is needed. Introducing a metaphor for this process might help highlight some of the processes and its consequences.

Flowing Data

Data is like water and flows of data are like streams. These streams of data can arise from any number of different sources: from a person entering data into a system; from a click stream generated as a side-effect of web browsing; application events; or generated from real-world sensor measurements. There are already many ways that we can tap into these data streams, using web-based query APIs, messaging systems like XMPP, or syndication protocols like Atom and RSS.

While these streams of data are already supporting a huge range of different applications and use cases, they are inherently limited: a stream has no memory. If historical context is required, e.g. to support more complex querying and reporting, then each consuming application must collect and store the data. We can think of these collections of data as pools; each stream of data on the web may feed any number of different application-specific pools.

A pool of data provides extra flexibility, but comes at the cost of requiring each consuming application to maintain its own infrastructure to hold copies of that data. Even if each source of data provides direct access to its own pool, e.g. by exposing a web-based query interface onto its database, or by exposing linked data, there are still unnecessary overheads. Each data provider must provide their own scalable infrastructure and support a rich set of data access options.

If we start building large pools of data, within a community supported infrastructure, then we have a reservoir. A reservoir is a pool of data that is maintained by and services a specific community. Reservoirs allow issues such as quality of service (reliable supply of water) and infrastructure costs (building of pipelines) to be solved at a community level.

Its possible to argue that the web already consists of streams, pools, and reservoirs, but there is a distinct difference between a web based on semantic web technology and a Web constructed of a mixture of XML documents or similar formats: like water, at the molecular level, all RDF is the same; its all triples. Unlike alternatives, RDF data is more easily pooled and collected and so is much more amenable to explorations of shared infrastructure. Like a relational database, an RDF triple-store can contain an huge variety of different kinds of data. But unlike a relational database, an RDF triple-store, has the potential for the aggregate to be much more than the some of its parts. The seeds of convergence are built in, through reliance ah the most fundamental level on a global naming system (URIs) and standardised ways to state equivalence and relationships between resources.

In the real world, reservoirs do more than supply a community with water. The aggregate has its own uses: water skiing or hydro-electric power generation for example. And the same will be true of semantic web data reservoirs: large collections of data can be analysed and re-purposed in ways that are not possible – or at least not achievable without a great deal of repeated, redundant integration effort – using other techniques. The reservoir itself can be the source of new facts and new streams of data derived from analysis of its contents.

Flowing Data through the Talis Platform

The goal of the Talis Platform is to support the growth of the Linked Data ecosystem by providing the infrastructure to support the creation of pools of data. For additional background, see my article “Enabling the Linked Data Ecosystem” from Nodalities issue 5.

At present the Platform provides a range of services that allow data to be easily streamed into and out of Platform stores, allowing data to be easily pooled in order to benefit from greater context. Data can be pushed directly into the Platform and we are exploring methods of supporting other forms of data ingestion to make it easier and more natural to begin to accumulate data sets within the Platform.

The core search service, which produces its results in RSS, allows the creation of simple data streams, while the SPARQL interface supports more complex data extraction methods. The Augmentation service provides an interesting twist on these conventional approaches, providing a means for any RSS 1.0 feed to be automatically enriched with extra metadata by feeding it through a Platform data store. This means of interaction is like fishing for data: it is possible to serendipitously find and extract data, capturing it as extra context to items in an RSS feed, without having to deal with writing SPARQL queries or constructing a keyword search. There are many more methods and modes of data extraction that will be added to the Platform to add to these existing services; this is just the beginning.

But the Talis Platform is intended to provide much more than just the ability to work with pools of data. The bigger vision is to support the creation of true data reservoirs, and enable many different ways of manipulating and analysing their contents in order to discover new facts and bring new context to that data. Creation of these larger pools of content will need to be made sustainable for the communities that are creating them, and deriving value from them. Sustainability covers a wide range of issues that go beyond just commercial issues: quality and range of services are additional factors, as are forms of governance, trust and quality that relate to the data sets themselves. The Platform is intended to address all of these issues.

To take a small example, the experimental “store groups” feature that was released at the end of last year, provides a simple method for combining datasets, without requiring that data to be completely loaded or copied into a single database. The store groups feature will ultimately support a range of services over the constituent data sets, allowing each pool of data to remain intact whilst still contributing to the whole; this will be important to support the new forms of governance that are beginning to emerge around datasets on the Linked Data web.

By Benjamin Nowack

| This article will feature in Nodalities Magazine, Issue 6

During the recent months, the Semantic Web community is accelerating its progress around web-enhanced information and knowledge management. Specifications such as RDF and SPARQL are increasingly applied by developers and organizations, RDF software is maturing. Even the initial chicken and egg problem around data and applications has now been solved by the Linking Open Data (LOD) project, which is bringing dataset after dataset online, each following recommended practices for simplified information access and repurposing. The time has finally come to move on and create the distributed data applications we have been dreaming of for so long.

Just like the Web’s true innovation was not hypertext as such, but freeing it from isolated CD ROMs, the Semantic Web’s value proposition is not information integration per se, but doing it on a global scale. Network effects will play an important role and have to be considered by application developers. Mashups on a semantic web are not one-off combinations of existing sources and APIs. They will feed their added value back into a self-enforcing Linked Data Ecosystem, thus enabling chains of applications, with each reaping the benefits of the previous one. RDF developers these days often use terms like “Meshup” or “Hyperdata” to describe the direction they are headed.

Linked Data is all about portability and off-site use: The more a respective application attracts users, the more will it let them take their data with them and also integrate external sources. With a bit of luck, we will see not one, but a wealth of killer applications, where the “unique selling proposition” is personal and defined by each user individually.
Despite the ongoing advances, some pieces to the puzzle are still missing. This becomes clearer when we correlate the current state of the Linked Data market to a typical information life cycle classification. While we can name solutions for each value-increasing process (Creation, Organization, Utilization, Distribution, Discovery), the Utilization and Application stage represents a bottleneck. Products start to benefit from Linked Data, but few are also re-distributing their internally enriched information. Additionally, the Creation phase today is mostly driven by dedicated efforts such as the LOD project, although data manipulation and enhancing should also be possible right while people are interacting with semantic web content.

A few months ago, Talis researcher Tom Heath wrote an inspiring IEEE Internet Computing essay titled “How Will We Interact with the Web of Data?” where he described the upcoming challenges and opportunities in the context of human-computer interaction. He suggested that on a web where the granularity is increased from documents to arbitrary things, user interfaces should treat individual objects as first-class citizens, ideally providing context-specific functionality, direct manipulation, and coherence across personal usage scenarios. Application models that go beyond browsing and which are both universal and user-friendly are an ongoing challenge.

A system that aims at finding a sweet spot between simplicity and standardized interaction is Paggr (paggr.com). The basic idea is to combine successful Web 2.0 solutions and trends with Tim Berners-Lee’s concept of an “RDF Clipboard” for polymorphic data exchange between desktop applications. The required technical trick for copy-by-reference across desktop and web applications was introduced by Ray Ozzie three years ago through his “Live Clipboard”. Around the same time, AJAX and converging browser capabilities mass-enabled interactive HTML elements, and personal portal builders such as Netvibes brought widgets and drag and drop to end-users. The amount of open datasets and technical possibilities finally led to a first prototype for building Linked Data Dashboards a few months ago.

The system used Netvibes-like pages with three resizable colums that could be populated with so-called Sparqlets. A Sparqlet is a SPARQL-powered widget, defined by a set of queries and result templates. The output consists of machine-readable HTML which addresses three essential requirements:

• Widgets can easily be copied to other dashboards, their complete definition is retrievable via HTTP (by de-referencing the widget identifier).
• Individual items in a widget can be interactively linked to other items, as each element is associated with a URI. This makes semantic drag and drop possible, such as dragging a person representation on a map or an address book widget.
• Being able to instantly feed augmented data back into the personal or public data cloud.

The prototype received encouraging and very helpful feedback at the International Semantic Web Conference (and even won a prize). We are clearly not ready for the mainstream user yet, but building on established interaction models seems to be a promising acceptance strategy. The next iteration of Paggr is now almost finished and we are looking forward to putting it online. The first public applications will be limited to focused use cases (such as an organizer for conference attendees) as we are still working on certain interface behaviors, but a private alpha phase with less restrictions is planned, too.

Linked Data Dashboards face a number of usability challenges. The big question is how to tie the wealth of possibilities to a generic user interface without sacrificing work efficiency. Application convenience often boils down to feature reduction and contextual options, possibly combined with shortcuts for common tasks. To reduce complexity, Paggr lets the user (or app creator) break the theoretically infinite possibilities down into separate dashboards, where options and relations can be further spread across widgets.

The more complicated part starts at the widget level. Semantic drag and drop is often multi-modal. Dragging an event on a calendar does not necessarily mean “Add”, there are many ways to link two persons to each other, etc. Also, working with Linked Data is sometimes like having a backstage pass for a concert: very exciting, but also a bit rough, easily overwhelming, and if you open the wrong door, you can quickly find yourself getting kicked out. Raw data (or equally ugly RDF/HTML dumps) are always just a link away, application designers will try to carefully shield non-developers from being exposed to things like DBPedia pages. For developers, on the other hand, this equivalent to the early Web’s “view source” feature can be very valuable.

Now, what exactly are the requirements and nice-to-haves, and (how) can they be implemented through widgets without leading to cluttered screen estate? As mentioned above, in order to support drag and drop as well as copy and paste between different browser tabs or even at the operating system level, we can use a technical trick introduced by Live Clipboard: transparent form fields that natively provide “right-click / paste” and similar functionality. For a consistent user experience, this means that we need distinguishable (but unobtrusive) fields for each interactive element. In Paggr, small Semantic Web icons next to widget items and title bars signal the availability of advanced options. They enable:

• widget filtering
• copying widget or item identifiers
• removing items from and adding items to widgets
• interlinking individual items
• custom contextual menus

The approach of using dedicated interaction zones has desirable side-effects. Non-expert users are less likely to get confused, as the general markup keeps its expected behavior. It also becomes possible to disable the semantic extensions simply by deactivating and hiding the icons. A public dashboard or shared meshup may look and feel just like a normal website.

There are still several unresolved issues left and future iterations could well require a complete re-design, but Paggr is just one of a growing number of consumer-oriented Linked Data systems. After years of hard infrastructure work, the Semantic Web community is finally starting to benefit from the investments. Data-wise, we have probably reached the tipping point already. Even former critics start to make their information available in RDF, efforts like microformats, once regarded as competitors, have become accessible from SPARQL, and services like OpenCalais, Yahoo!’s SearchMonkey, or the Zemanta API are constantly reinforcing the network effects of structured open data. It should only be a matter of months until we are going to see the first fully-fledged Linked Data applications for end-users.

Benjamin Nowack is the developer of Paggr. He runs semsol, a tiny Semantic Web agency in Düsseldorf, Germany.

By Alex Tucker

| This article will feature in Nodalities Magazine, Issue 6

Confessions of a Semantic Web Junkie

Let me start with a confession: I’ve been banging on about the semantic web to anyone who will listen to me for the past nine years.  For some apparently deep seated reason, which some have even labelled perverse, I’ve kept at it despite endless meetings, misunderstandings, off-handed dismissals and blatant refusals to accept what seems to me to be obvious.  It’s been a long and sometimes despairing nine years, but looking around now at the state of all things semantic web, one can’t fail to realize that it’s finally taking off and that companies like Talis are fully committed to its success.

During much of this time I’ve been working for various defence organisations showing how using semantic web standards and tools can help solve issues of interoperability — getting different systems to talk to one another.  That the semantic web, and more specifically the semantic web ontology language OWL, can address these kinds of issues shouldn’t be too surprising, given that the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) helped fund the process which eventually led to OWL, precisely to solve issues of semantic interoperability.

More recently, I’ve had the pleasure of working with various teams and projects within NATO who have embraced the semantic web ideas and expanded on them in novel ways.  A fundamental shift in attitude in defence, which has in part been driven by the 9/11 Commission’s findings, is that intelligence agencies must move from a ‘need to know’ to a ‘need to share’ mentality.  For me, this shift has echoes in the ‘linked open data’ ideals, and for someone who also bangs on about open source, open standards and all things open, it’s a step in the right direction.  Obviously, sharing information in a military context is a little different to the ideals of linked open data, but the fundamental issues around getting the information out of existing silos and usable by other systems are much the same.

A recent success in one such NATO project has been the decision to move from using a bespoke query protocol for RDF, a sort of ‘query by example’, to using the World Wide Web Consortium’s new semantic web query language, SPARQL.  This might seem obvious, but a few years ago when the protocol was being developed, SPARQL didn’t exist — therein lies another discussion on how organisations need to be more agile to be able to cope with the length of a ‘Web Year’.  As far as the project group are concerned however, this is great news, as they don’t have to come up with a ‘Standardization Agreement’ or STANAG to define their own query protocol and can instead just point to and use an existing standard, SPARQL.

Bonjour

Another standard used by this project is Bonjour (formerly Zercoconfig or Rendezvous), Apple’s open standard for no-nonsense network configuration and service discovery—the technology behind iTunes’ ability to discover and play music from other iTunes applications on different computers. The great thing about using Bonjour for this project is that it’s decentralized: there’s no need to set up the registry of information providers beforehand. Instead, each provider is free to publish their existence and their capabilities, both on a local and wide area network, without setting up any new infrastructure. Each service in a local network can publish its details in any number of domains. The clouds above represent local networks, the arrows represent the act of publishing, or registering service details to a domain, the cylinders represent services, and the ‘.local’ is the domain for the local network.  iTunes, for instance, currently publishes itself only to the local area network (which is different to the initial iTunes release where people realised they could share their music with friends over the internet by advertising their iTunes database to their own domain name, how terrible).  The domains themselves correspond to the normal domain name system (DNS) names we’re used to, since DNS is really at the heart of the Bonjour protocol.

Services can then be discovered simply by looking for a particular service type in a particular domain; a typical Bonjour service discovery query would ask for all printer services in the local domain.  These service types are given slightly cryptic names (iTunes, for example, uses _daap._tcp), but are all listed on-line at dns-sd.org/ServiceTypes.html for everyone to see and re-use.

Hello SPARQL

What we’ve done then is create a service type for SPARQL, allowing information providers to publish their SPARQL ‘endpoints’ to be discovered by information consumers.  Technically, the SPARQL service type is _sparql._tcp and is listed at dns-sd.org/ServiceTypes.html along with a short description of the properties which should be published.

In keeping with the RDF mantra that “anyone can say anything about anything”, we’ve tried to ensure that anyone can publish a description of not only their own SPARQL services, but also those of others.  A published SPARQL service record has two properties, one called ‘path’ and one called ‘metadata’, from which a client derives two URLs, the former pointing to the SPARQL service endpoint, and the latter pointing to some arbitrary (RDF/XML encoded) metadata it can fetch. The normal approach would be to just use simple paths (e.g. /sparql and /service-metadata.rdf) for the values of these properties, which would be interpreted as pointing to the discovered host (e.g. http://dbpedia.org/sparql and http://dbpedia.org/service-metadata.rdf).  However, by using a full URL for the value of either property, a service record can be published which points to a service or some metadata on a different host entirely, allowing us to form what are essentially proxy records for existing SPARQL services which don’t (yet) use Bonjour service discovery.

The Bonjour specifications are firmly geared towards making the user’s life simpler, so for instance while the name of a service is really just a normal DNS name, the specifications insist that it should be a human readable name with proper capitalization, spaces etc., although no dots are allowed.  The specifications also give guidance as to the sorts of properties and values a service record should contain, and are keen that service records be as concise as possible and leave much of the nitty-gritty details of discovering service capability to the main protocol, in our case SPARQL.

Into the voID

However, the SPARQL protocol doesn’t have much to say about what to expect of an endpoint other than, “here it is.”  Our approach to this has been to allow a little bit of extra information in the service record, for instance using the ‘vocabs’ property to declare the URIs of any vocabularies the service uses.  To find out more information about a service, a consumer can use the value of the ‘metadata’ property to fetch a fuller service description.  The only restriction is that this service description should be marked up in RDF/XML — what better way to encode metadata?

As to what this service description metadata should contain, well that’s currently left to the provider.  In an ideal world, using RDF and OWL to describe a service would mean that it is completely self-describing and that a consumer could fetch the document, fetch any referred ontologies, and figure out what it all means completely automatically.  In reality, we at least need some existing, vocabulary to refer to, even if the client can infer and interpret meaning using ontologies.  For us, that vocabulary is a bespoke ontology which is currently being worked on, but which is good enough for our needs right now.

So I was heartened to be shown a glimpse of voID last year, which upon further reading looks to offer exactly the sort of service description vocabulary needed to complement our Bonjour SPARQL service type.  Another great thing about RDF (see, I’m such a zealot), is that an RDF document can easily use multiple vocabularies, and the instance data doesn’t even necessarily need to be linked together, so the service description document can happily accommodate the use of  more than one service description vocabulary or ontology without breaking anything.  We’ll see what happens, but my vote would currently be for voID to be the suggested minimum requirement.

Why?

There’s currently a list of SPARQL endpoints on the World Wide Web Consortium’s ESW wiki, along with a comment along the lines that the list will probably not get much bigger in the long run.  The comment itself is well reasoned and not necessarily meant to be a negative one, but along with similar comments from peers certainly makes us stand back and wonder at the usefulness of any kind of registry, or even a decentralized set of registries, of SPARQL services.

There’s no doubt that the project I’m working with needs this right now, so it’s certainly useful, but what about when, and if, things get much bigger?  A well known web technologist has published Bonjour service types for HTTP and HTTPS at dns-sd.org, but lately there doesn’t seem to be much take-up for this kind of facility, even if Apple’s Safari web browser has built in support with its Bonjour bookmarks feature.

On the other hand, Google does such a wonderful job, giving us a single endpoint to query the whole of the web, that it’s tempting to think that the semantic web will ultimately be sucked up in a similar fashion into a great big semantic data warehouse in the clouds, and there’ll be no need for anyone to offer up their own SPARQL endpoints.

My own expectation is that we’ll end up with something in between.  On the one side there will be one or a few massive Google like entry points which will, by spidering across the web, perhaps following the linked data trail, suck up much of the semantic web and present it to users in a simple, easy to consume and re-use entry point.  But just as when you’re searching for something specific, for instance buying a book, or trawling through your bank statement, you don’t start at Google, I think there are plenty of cases where you’d want to be able to automatically discover SPARQL endpoints which you can access directly and which offer you precisely the details you need, there and then.

The semantic web is different to the (syntactic?) web, in that it makes it much easier to take information from multiple sources and join it together into something new and more useful.  Imagine if everyone’s desktop were part of the semantic web, with all the information about from emails, photos, music etc. offered up through SPARQL services (take a look at the Nepomuk project for an existing implementation of this).  Imagining the sorts of applications we could build on top of the Semantic Desktop is an exciting prospect, but it’s not something I’d expect most people would want to make available through a single Google style data warehouse, even if there were privacy safeguards in place, in the same way that most people don’t want to necessarily share all their photos on Flikr or Picasa.

Using Bonjour to discover SPARQL services means that a user can easily create or select a list of domains where their client applications will look for published enpoints, be they public or private, and given the right credentials they will be allowed to use those services to build the sorts of applications they want, no matter how esoteric: show me a list of all the photos of my son, sorted by the number of teeth he had, using my local photos as well as the photos taken by his grandparents; give me a list of washing machines, along with prices from these suppliers, where the washing machine is no wider than 60cm and has a Which Best Buy rating over 70%.

Of course, if we start making all this sort of information available through our own SPARQL services, then there are all sorts of issues around trust, privacy, provenance and accuracy, but at the very least we are in control of our own data.

Try It!

Using Bonjour to publish and discover SPARQL services is simplicity itself, and I invite you to take a look at www.floop.org.uk/eagle/discovering-sparql for some command-line examples.

While at the moment none of the SPARQL servers out there publish their details using Bonjour, I’ve created a simple application for Tomcat which can publish any of the services it runs using Bonjour, and have used it to publish Joseki based SPARQL services.  I’m also working on both a SPARQL endpoint and Bonjour publishing for Plone and Zope.  See http://www.floop.org.uk/projects for more details of these nascent projects.

What would be great is if the existing SPARQL servers and triples stores out there could add optional support for registering the details of any endpoints they make available, using Bonjour.  It would certainly help the uptake of SPARQL in the projects I’m involved with.

Alex Tucker is a self-employed semantic web consultant, specialising in defence.

By Tom Scott and Michael Smethurst

| This article features in Nodalities Magazine, Issue 5

Telling (non-linear) stories

For the past 86 years the BBC has plied its trade as a storytelling organisation. In the world of linear broadcasting we’ve even gotten very good at it. Guiding the audience through complex news story lines, explaining the natural world and, interleaved narrative arcs and the plotlines of drama has become our forte. But storytelling in a linear world is different from storytelling in the non-linear, hypertext world of the web.

With the exception of BBC News Online (news.bbc.co.uk) the online world has often been seen as a supporting adjunct to the linear broadcast world. Over the years we’ve commissioned and built sites to provide online support for programmes; but we’ve too often taken our linear storytelling expertise and attempted to replicate the same techniques on the web – with mixed success. Unlike linear broadcast storylines the web doesn’t provide people with a predicted and controlled linear journey. Instead we dip in and out of any given website — following different journeys — to find the information we want at that time.

Many of our programme support sites have been commissioned and developed in isolation. So you see an Archers site and an Eastenders site and a Top Gear site which are internally coherent but which fail to link up other than via editorially determined cross promotions. Want to see who presents Top Gear? No problem, we can do that. Want to see what else those people present? Sorry, can’t do that. By developing self-contained microsites the BBC has produced some good stuff but it has also been unable to reach its full potential because it hasn’t managed to join up all of its resources. By failing to link up the content (on both a data and a user experience level) the stuff we publish can never becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Without these links we can’t make bbc.co.uk a coherent experience. As a user, it’s very difficult to find everything the BBC has published about any given subject, nor can you easily navigate across BBC domains following a particular semantic thread. For example, you can’t yet navigate from a page about a musician to a page with all the programmes that have played that artist.

So how do you tell stories on a web scale? We could stick with the easy option and try to control ‘user journeys’ across the site. Provide links to where we think the user should go next. But that’s little better than those flip a dice, go to page 30 dungeons and dragons books we all had as kids. We had to recognise that non-linear storytelling puts the narrative arc into the hands of the user. What to read, what to click, where to go next is really up to you. So storylines split and merge, meta-narratives emerge and fracture; ‘user journeys’ slip out of (editorial) control.

All of this comes from the power of the link – back to basics. But we can only provide precisely targeted links at the user experience level if those links exist at a data level. And that’s the difficult part. The organic growth of our sites has been mirrored in the organic growth of our content and data management systems. We currently have a range of systems across the business for managing different bits of content throughout the production chain. And like our public facing sites none of these speak the same language or share the same identifiers. A typical episode of Top Gear might have 6 separate identifiers on it’s way from scriptwriter to airwaves to archive. Once you’ve solved this problem you hit the problem of multiple identifiers for James May and once you’ve got one canonical James May you’re back to the problem of multiple identifiers for all the other programmes he’s presented…

Solving these problems makes for a more linked, more coherent bbc.co.uk. But an internally coherent bbc.co.uk isn’t enough. bbc.co.uk needs to be weaved into the rest of the web, not merely on the web. It needs to be linked in to all those other Top Gear / James May pages out there… Luckily the tips, tricks and techniques pioneered by the Linked Data community give us some clues here.

Add into this mix the fact that there’s some data the BBC can never hope to provide. So we know when an artist is played on radio or TV. But we can’t hope to know when they were born, or where they were born, or which bands they’ve been in, or who they’re married to etc. If we want to tell stories around music all this is important data. And we can only get it by tapping into the collective knowledge of the web.

BBC in the web of data

I’d like to claim that when we set out to develop /programmes we had the warm embrace of the semantic web in mind. But that would be a lie. We were however building on very similar philosophical foundations.

In the work leading up to bbc.co.uk/programmes we were all too aware of the importance of persistent web identifiers, permanent URIs and the importance of links as a way to build meaning. To achieve all this we broke with BBC tradition by designing from the domain model up rather than the interface down. The domain model provided us with a set of objects (brands, series, episodes, versions, ondemands, broadcasts etc) and their sometimes tangled interrelationships.

We were also convinced that the value in programme websites lay not in the implicit metadata of the domain model but rather in the way this domain model overlapped and intersected with other domains. As ever the links are more important than the nodes because that’s where the context lives: programmes:segment music:track, programmes:segment food:recipe etc. In this way we could weave new ‘user journeys’ into and out of /programmes, into and out of bbc.co.uk. From archive episodes no longer available online, to a recipe page, to a chef, to another recipe and back to a recent episode. Using well targeted content specific links we could not only escape the dead end content silos that characterised bbc.co.uk but point users back to programmes that would hopefully inform, educate and of course entertain.

Finally we believed in the merits of opening our data and building on top of other people’s open data. When we looked to rebuild bbc.co.uk/music we looked at a number of commercial providers of music metadata. They all did a similar job to MusicBrainz (musicbrainz.org) – similar models, similar data quality etc. But choosing to go with a commercial provider would have precluded our ability to provide any kind of machine friendly (API if you must) views. The decision to publish JSON or vanilla XML or RDF would have been a decision to give the 3rd party business model away. So we went with the open alternative – an open, public domain provider, one that is more in keeping with our public service remit and one that represents better value for money for the license fee payer – which has to be a lesson to someone.

Without ever explicitly talking RDF we’d built a site that complied with Tim Berners-Lee’s four principles for Linked Data:

• Use URIs as names for things. – CHECK
• Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names. – CHECK
• When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information. – Well, if we’re only talking HTML, RSS, ATOM, JSON etc. CHECK
• Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things. – Again if we’re talking HTML only CHECK

By keeping everything in its right place we’d also built a sane, maintainable, scalable, accessible site that search engines love and could be easily evolved to add new features and functionality. So to anyone considering how best to build websites we’d recommend you throw out the Photoshop and embrace Domain Driven Design and the Linked Data approach every time. Even if you never intend to publish RDF it just works.

Around this time we met by chance with some people from the Linking Open Data community and the two worlds collided. Obviously TBL wasn’t talking only HTML in the last 2 principles but aside from that the parallels were striking. We set about converting our programmes domain model into an RDF ontology which we’ve since published under a Creative Commons License (www.bbc.co.uk/ontologies/programmes/). Which took one person about a week. The trick here isn’t the RDF mapping – it’s having a well thought through and well expressed domain model. And if you’re serious about building web sites that’s something you need anyway. Using this ontology we began to add RDF views to /programmes (e.g. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00f91wz.rdf). Again the work needed was minimal.

So for those considering the Linked Data approach we’d say that 95% of the work is work you should be doing just to build for the (non-semantic) web. Get the fundamentals right and the leap to the Semantic Web is really more of a hop.

Why bother with RDF?

For all the pages we’ve published we’ve only had a limited success at making this information available for others to use, to hack with and to build new services with. While we’ve not done a very good job of making bbc.co.uk a coherent experience for people the situation is worse for machines.
It is our belief that rather than publishing proprietary APIs it is better to use the ubiquitous technologies of URIs and HTTP. This approach supports the generative nature of the Web, making it easy for third parties to build with BBC metadata without learning BBC specific APIs and at the same time providing the BBC and its users with immediate benefits.

Services like Flickr, Twitter and the like have in many, many ways followed the same principles we adopted for programmes and music — or if they didn’t then the end results look pretty similar — they are wonderful services. However, if as a third party developer you want to deal with the semantics, accessing the data via the Giant Global Graph to find everything about a certain person, place or topic and you wanted to include data from Flickr then you will need to deal with the specifics of Flickr. I suspect that it wouldn’t be that difficult for Flickr to add RDF representations – if they did then Flickr content would be part of a common way of doing things. We want BBC data to be part of a common way of doing things.

Our hope in making BBC data available as RDF is that we will make it as generative as possible – helping others to do interesting things with our data. The BBC has a public service remit, a remit that means it should look beyond its internal business needs to help create public value around useful technologies and around its content for others to benefit from. The longer term aim of this work is to not only expose BBC data but to ensure that it is contextually linked to the wider web. We have started along this path by linking to Wikipedia (DBpedia in the RDF view) and MusicBrainz from the artist pages but this could be extended for programmes and events.

| This post will feature in Nodalities Magazine, Issue 5
By Anders Söderbäck and Martin Malmsten

LIBRIS is the Swedish National Union Catalogue, or, in other words, the main gateway for bibliographic data in Sweden. LIBRIS consists of roughly six million bibliographic records, 20 million library holdings records, and two hundred thousand authority records on authors, titles and subject headings (“Svenska ämnesord”). The LIBRIS system is used for cataloguing by about 170 library organisations. The participating libraries come mainly from the academic sector (i.e. university libraries), but it is also possible to find museums, archives and some public libraries. Last but not least LIBRIS is also the home of the Swedish National bibliography. LIBRIS is created co-operatively, but is hosted and maintained by the National Library of Sweden.

Earlier this year, LIBRIS was published as Linked Data on the web, exposing the entire library state with all its records, links and relations. As far as we know, this is the first union catalogue or national library catalogue to be published in its entirety as linked data. Not counting lcsh.info (which is great, but contains no bibliographic information) it is the first effort by a national library to actually be part of the semantic web. We made this effort using a “data first” strategy, focusing on availability rather than a perfect representation of the database. The reason for this strategy was simple: We did not know the perfect structure for a bibliographic web of data. Neither did we want to spend our time just thinking about this. Libraries are, in our opinion, very good at thinking and rethinking bibliographic data. Actual reworking and restructuring of library data unfortunately seems less common. For us, the best way to get to know a technology—whether MARC records or the Semantic Web—is to get our hands dirty and work with it. Progress comes, we firmly believe, by learning from mistakes and learning to adapt to new environments, not by staying safely at home making up the perfect travel plan.

Learning also comes from talking and discussing with other people, which is why we wanted to provide something to talk about as quickly as possible. Trying to move beyond the library community, we wanted to use ontologies that were not library specific. For this reason we used Dublin Core, SKOS, FOAF and Bibliontology. Where no existing ontology seemed applicable (holdings, frbr relations), we made up our own. Using the identifiers from our database (MARC field 001, for all you library people out there), we created cool HTTP URIs for bibliographic and authority records. Following the four rules of Linked data specified by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, we tried to provide anyone who looked up those URIs with as much useful information and as many links to other URIs as possible. For the most part, this meant links to other resources within the LIBRIS dataset. Since we already had a good bespoke mapping of our Swedish subject headings to the Library of Congress subject headings, we generated approximately twelve thousand links to lcsh.info. In keeping with our desire to move beyond the library community, we also included a handful of links to wikipedia and dbpedia. In a not too distant future, we plan to automatically extend the number of these links to about thirty thousand.

All of the above is described in more detail in Making a Library Catalogue Part of the Semantic Web (Malmsten 2008). What is not described in this paper, however, is why we decided to depart into semantic web territory. One could of course attribute this departure to inborn curiosity. As librarians and developers we naturally want to explore new landscapes in the ecology of knowledge. But the reason why we started looking at linked data might just as well be more prosaic. In 2007 we made a major revision of our web OPAC. We did this using an open and collaborative methodology, focusing on user centred design as well as communication with just about anyone having an interest in what we were doing. During this process, we discovered that there was a huge interest in getting access to the data contained in the LIBRIS database in a machine readable way. This interest was not limited to the library community, but was expressed by a lot of people working outside the library space with no experience of library specific protocols such as z39.50 and MARC.

In 2008, having our data available in a machine readable-way feels just as natural to us as making our data available in a human readable interface. In building a library catalogue: our purpose and responsibility is to provide access to library resources. Limiting this access to paths that can only be walked by humans seem to be an unnecessary restriction, which certainly is not in the best interest of our users. The library catalogue might also be considered a resource in itself, and there is no reason why we should not make this resource available for the public just as we do with our books and other resources. Of course, this can be achieved without creating linked data on the semantic web. Why not, for example, use z39.50, SRU/W or OAI-PMH? The answer to this question is that we make our data available in those ways as well. We have also put up a HTTP based web service which can output LIBRIS data as MARC-XML, Dublin Core, Json, RIS or MODS. If we for some strange reason ran out of other things to do, we could probably spend the rest of our lives just building APIs. This situation called for a more rational approach.

A trouble with the above mentioned methods of data access is that they only provide information that is present in the original MARC records. No information is given about other linked resources. When looking up a certain resource in our OPAC, a human viewer is provided with a lot of information that is not present to the machine accessing individual records through a search/retrieve protocol. From this perspective, working with rdf and linked data is a lot more rational, since it makes it possible for us to expose the entire state of our library system in a web friendly way. Ed Summers, who is the person at the Library of Congress responsible for creating lcsh.info, describes this very eloquently in a blog post from the beginning of 2008. API:s, Ed writes, “…all differ in their implementation details and require you to digest their API documentation before you can do anything useful. Contrast this with the Web of Data which uses the ubiquitous technologies of URIs and HTTP plus the secret sauce of the RDF triple.” As a alternative to making open API:s for just about every aspect of our data, we hope that allowing our data to be crawled by human and machine alike will allow for new ways of discovery, as well as for people using our data in ways not even imagined by us. The Swedish Government has, as one of the objectives given to us as a National Library, stated that the LIBRIS systems shall be used as a broad information resource for the improvement of information management within research and higher education. Putting as few restrictions as possible on how our data can be used is, we feel, probably the best way to achieve this objective.

When it comes to the improvement of information management, the linking between different datasets made possible by linked data shows a lot of promise for cooperation and interoperability between libraries as well as for bridging the gap between libraries and other knowledge organizations. This is something we have only begun to explore. The aforementioned links to lsch.info are useful for making inferences about relations not present in our system of subject headings from relations present in LCSH. The value of these kinds of inferences will increase exponentially the bigger the cloud of linked library data grows. While we at this time only have a few links to dbpedia, we hope that the upcoming addition of a substantial number of dbpedia links will provide interesting possibilities for us as well as for others. Libraries have, over the last few hundred years years, collected huge amounts of what is usually very good data. Locked up in individual databases, this is good for retrieval of resources belonging to individual libraries. This, it needs to be stated, is not a bad thing! Publishing library databases in rdf but without links to other datasets might be good for individual libraries if only for the opportunity to use SPARQL, which is a query language we have fallen in love with and which we imagine might fulfill any librarians desire for good, exhaustive database querying.

Linked library data provides amazing opportunities for cooperation about, for example, authority data. This way of making use of each others intellectual efforts seem to us an effective way of improving the quality of the individual catalogue, while at the same time improving the quality of the web at large. Authority databases are amazing resources, and probably useful for other purposes than just improving search in the individual OPAC. Exposing library data might also be a good way to get feedback on our data from outside the library community. Visibility and open communication provides good ways of quality improvement, which has been proven again and again in science as well as in society. Libraries might be good data providers and a cloud of linked open library data might give rise to interesting perspectives, exciting new applications and better competition between developers, be they commercial system vendors, ad-funded search engines, or in house library development teams. Such competition probably ends up benefiting our users, because in the end libraries are not about catalogues, bibliographic formats, databases or OPACS. Libraries are about openness, about dissemination and access to research and cultural heritage, about science, memory and democracy. For this reason, libraries need to stop worrying and embrace web standards. A web of data without library participation is a bad thing, not only for libraries but also for the web.

Last Friday a few of us went down to HP Labs offices in Bristol for a great free event hosted by Andy Seaborne – including free lunch. Free food always seems to make a difference, is that just me?

Nadeem’s blogged some of the sessions in detail over at Virtual Chaos and Ian Davis over at Internet Alchemy gives his own perspective. Other people covering off much of the detail is one of the great benefits of leaving the blogging for a few days after the event

A few of us are down at HP Labs in Bristol. Andy Seaborne is hosting a great free event for those interested in Semantic Web developments in the UK.

After Andy’s welcome, Ian opened the day with a presentation on where we’ve got to with the Talis Platform – over the past 3 years we’ve come a very long way, as you can from Ian’s Slides and Nadeem’s Summary. Our platform is an example of PaaS (Platform as a Service) – that is, we hope to do the heavy lifting of managing large volumes of data, indexing it, making sure it’s backed up and so on so you can concentrate on building applications. That’s a message that seemed to go down really well with lots of people grabbing us for more information during breaks and lunch.

For the rest of the day there were a good handful of very interesting sessions from a whole host of people trying to do real, practical things with semantic web technologies.

There were a few things that seemed to stand out as threads through the day – a lot of people using Jena, Redland got a couple of mentions, but mostly it was Jena. I had a great chat with Chris Dollin and it’s obvious that they take great pride in Jena, not only in the codebase and what it can do but also in the developer and user community that has formed around it. There was also a lot of interest in ontologies with people focussing on the use of ontologies to assist in user-interactions and various people mapping overlapping ontologies to allow semantic relationship to be recognised between disparate datasets.

In essence this was about people starting to do very real things, a point emphasised by Alberto Reggiori of @semantics when in one slide he announced that RDF is dead, only to have it resurrected 3 days later, complete with a slide featuring the risen Christ – award for best laugh of the day goes to Alberto. To hear more from Alberto, listen to the podcast he just did with us.

Most worthy project of the day has to go Health-e-Child, a project that is helping paediatric medical research by providing federated search services across medical data at several participating European hospitals. The hospitals have to keep their own data, due to confidentiality concerns and this data is in any number of different schemas with varying vocabularies. Ontologies feature heavily in what Peter Bloodsworth has been doing and it will be interested to see how this project progresses. It’s great to hear more from him in his podcast with us.

The back-channel chat on IRC (#swig on irc.freenode.net) was, as usual, a light-hearted and useful tool, with people sharing the links from the presentations in almost real-time. It even resulted in Sir Tim pitching in with a correction for Ordnance Survey’s site:

14:40:24 <timbl> ooops http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/ontology/SpatialRelations.owl is Content-Type: application/octet-stream

Catherine Dolbear did a great job of describing the ways in which OS are playing with small RDF datasets. With Ordnance Survey’s current business model (which she stated was unlikely to change without Government changing it for them) the data is their crown jewels, so you don’t get to play with new technologies with; especially when they’d be talking about more than ten billion triples. They have published some ontologies, see timbl quote above, but unfortunately these have been released under cc-nc-sa license, making it hard for them to be widely adopted. In questions later she told me that wasn’t something they would change. Unwittingly, Catherine also provide us with the great slide on the right.

The point of the slide was to indicate the complexity of some of the queries that geo-data requires to be useful, things like “inside” – it just made me laugh inside that “Every island is a kind of land that is surrounded by water” constituted a complex statement. That little laugh, of course, belies much of the problem we have developing the semantic web – stating the bleeding obvious in ways that are complete and unambiguous.

As a nice counter-point to Catherine’s presentation, Richard Cyganiak presented on Sindice (or Cindy Ché as it came up on the #swig back-channel). Sindice is pulling in data from Linked Data sources such as dbpedia, geonames and everyone’s foaf files and indexing them in a semantic search engine offering. What makes the nice contrast with Catherine’s presentation is the scale, 20M+ documents, 80M+ URIs, 4M+ IFPs, 2B+ triples – that’s 2 billion triples… indexing is using Solr, and there’s some hadoop in there for parallel data processing.

It’s great to see the UK semweb community thriving like this. Get-togethers are so important in allowing people the time to do show ‘n’ tell to their friends and peers. Perhaps we should organise another one soon, making sure to find a good caterer for lunch of course.

Day 1, Session 2, and Jonathan Zittrain “will both highlight and challenge counterintuitive arguments that Web 2.0 architectures pose distinct problems for competition, innovation, and freedom.” Here goes, then.

Incidentally, there’s a flow of twittering from the conference over here.

Jonathan – professor of Law at Harvard and Oxford.

Feeling ‘contrarian’ about Web 2.0 because;

Gone from ‘sterile’ to ‘generative’ technologies during the 20th century. Tabulation of 1880 census boring, and Hollerith‘s invention of punch card for use by census interviewers revolutionised process. Business model was innovative, too; rented machines to government for census, rather than selling them.

But IBM mainframes and Brother word processors were closed; they did what they were built to do, and there were intermediaries between you and them.

Generative shift to products like the Apple II – you could write the software you wanted to run, without recourse to the vendor. ‘Open Software’ almost irrelevant here – Windows and Linux will run any software you choose to write for them, so both are generative and enabling.

“There’s no main menu for the Internet”

‘Hourglass Architecture’ of the Internet applies equally to the generic PC; carrying any traffic.

Poster child of modern devices; the iPhone. But it’s essentially the same model as the sterile start screens of the Brother word processor, Compuserve, and other closed environments we believe we left behind.

Zittrain points to the need to license hairdressers etc… yet anyone can write code that millions download and run on their own machines. Does this make sense?

Points to Google and Facebook Terms and Conditions – both of which require certain behaviours, non-discrediting of the Platform provider, etc… and they reserve the right to begin charging or terminate access at any point. Zittrain asks if we would have accepted similar Terms before developing on Windows, etc.

Requirement for global regulability raises concerning issues. Eg tethered devices… EchoStar required by Tivo to disable functionality in machines already bought by their customers, remotely and down the wire. Customers of EchoStar, who have bought the product and recorded programmes with it in good faith lose all access to them without warning.

“The move to Web 2.0 is a move in which your relationship as a consumer/developer is constant with the vendor; the vendor can change that relationship at any time, or be required to do so by a higher authority such as government.” As with financial advice, Web 2.0 apps can get better or worse… ?

What do we do?

Move from privacy policy to [data] portability policy, to ensure that an individual can extract their data from an app, should it change in ways that they do not like.

Sometimes it might be advantageous to ‘cut the tether’. Eg hardware makers not liable when their machines are used for illegal filesharing because they are no longer liable for use once the device leaves the factory. That’s no longer true online, as they are deemed to be in an ongoing and endless relationship. Maybe there is value in not assuming that every app is constantly evolving…

API neutrality would be good…

Semantic Web – structured data on the web would free innovation, and allow anyone to build apps that leverage the sort of intelligence that Google and other large providers gain for themselves from their internal ‘Database of Intentions’ at the moment. Ties in with our ‘Web of Intentions‘ ideas, which is good…

Technorati Tags: open data, open data commons, Talis, Web 2.0, web2summit

In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I talk with Carlos González-Cadenas about ExperienceOn Ventures, the technology they are developing, and their first ‘product’; the transformative travel site BeFogg.com.

Carlos has written about his particular take on ‘Web 3.0′, and we explore his perspective further during the call.

Carlos is Founder and CEO of ExperienceOn Ventures, based in the Spanish city of Barcelona.

Listen Now

Download MP3 [45 mins, 21Mb]

This conversation was conducted using Skype on Friday 14 September, recorded with Ecamm Network‘s Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

For further Talking with Talis podcasts on the emerging Web of Data, see here.

Technorati Tags: BeFogg.com, Podcasting, ExperienceOn Ventures, Semantic Web, Talis, Talking with Talis, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

Jack Schofield offers an interesting addition to the ongoing Facebook-as-Platform theme in today’s Technology Guardian.

Towards the end of the piece, Jack writes;

“[Jason Kottke] is right in principle, but what if he’s wrong in practice? Developers might not like the idea of a Balkanised internet – with incompatible services dominant in different countries – but if Facebook users like what they’ve got, why should they care?

Some might see the internet as a confusing mess. They don’t want to waste time figuring out which sites are best: they don’t want freedom of choice, they want freedom from choice.”

He has a point, which only increases the need to find compelling ways to argue and demonstrate the benefits of a more open alternative as I’ve been doing in these three posts.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Platforms, Talis

Having got back from the excellent d.Construct 2006 conference in Brighton last week and looking at my intermittent postings from the event, I thought a retrospective overview may be of interest for those that missed out on the opportunity to attend.

Sessions:

Jeff Barr, Amazon – Web Services: Fueling Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Classic Jeff Barr presenting the compelling dual case for building your business on top of Amazon’s web services (SAAS) and building your application on Amazon’s computing services – he coined the new term ‘Hardware-as-a-Service’ (HAAS). Even including humans in the loop via api calls to Mechanical Turk. – Maybe Mechanical Turk should be labeled PAAS – People-as-a-service.

Subject of much post-session discussions around who was brave enough to let Amazon be your mission critical partner.

Paul Hammond & Simon Willison, Yahoo! – Web Services for Fun and Profit.
The key message from this entertaining pair was: Be it an internal or an external service, build it from Web Services. This will by default encourage innovation and make work more enjoyable. Yahoo! Run internal hack-fest days to encourage such innovation.

Jeremy Keith, ClearLeft (Conference Organisers) – The joy of API.
An interesting ramble through Jeremy’s mashup experiences. From an api producer’s point of view, the key messages were: The simpler the better – if you can understand the api call from what its URL looks like you are a long way towards getting your api adopted. SOAP is far too heavyweight and obscure – REST rules.

Aral Balkan – Mash My Flex Up.
Aral did a good job of promoting of Flex 2 and the Flash Platform as a superior environment for Open Source web development. Adobe may own the player, but it is openly distributed and more powerful and capable than AJAX.

Derek Featherstone, FurtherAhead – Accessible Web Applications in a Post Web 1.0 World.

His brief was “How do we build modern web applications that use DOM Scripting and Ajax-type technologies and ensure that they are accessible”.

He debunked the myth that the route to an accessible site was just to turn off JavaScript, and went on to point out the simple things you need to do to make things like pop-up suggest boxes useable in a screen reader environment.

Thomas Vander Wal, InfoCloud Solutions – Understanding Folksonomy (Tagging that Works).
The least exciting session of the day. His key message was that you must retain the three way relationship between the tag, the object being tagged, and the identity of the tagger. That way you have the ability to build up information about communities who are tagging etc.

Jeffrey Veen, Google – Designing the Complete User Experience.

Jeffrey was pushing the mantra of lots of User Research as early as possible in a project. Identify their objectives and goals and match them to your feature list. If they don’t want it why develop it – if it’s not on the feature list it probably should be – supported by pictures of walls full of post-it notes in the Google Offices of the Web Analytics team.

He also was pushing the need to ‘design’ the user experience [functionality, features look and feel], not just the look of a site.

Other not in session things of interest:

• Impromptu ‘Microformats picnic’ took place in the park at the rear of the venue at lunchtime. Microformats were a hot topic in the back-channels of the conference. Microformats is the new RSS! In the same way that RSS is a simple easy API to your data events, embedding your on-screen data in miroformats provides a simple open api to the data itself.
• Conference social networking was supported by a backnetwork  provided by conference sponsor Madgex.

  Of the 350 attendees, 260 registered with it. Great way of tracking people’s contact details [all in microformats] and who you met with. Also provides feeds from blogs and Flickr tagged dConstruct06.

Overall, a good conference well worth attending – I’ll be looking out for next year!

Technorati Tags: d.construct 2006, dconstruct06, Web Services, Web 2.0, AWS

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0