A couple days ago, Michael Hausenblas suggested I look at something called Ubiquity, and sent me a link. Because it came in the middle of editing the current version of Nodalities Magazine, I did what I often do with interesting concepts: I opened a new firefox tab and left it there for two days, hoping I would notice it before firefox crashed with all tabs on board. Well, since then, there has certainly been a lot of discussion about Ubiquity—both around the office and on the web. To introduce it, I can’t do much worse than pointing at their video and introduction page, and just say that it’s a Mozilla labs project and a Firefox plug-in.

However, what makes it interesting to me, is that it possibly introduces a new metaphor for interacting with web content—and, vicariously, linked data. The thought process behind it is that whenever we want to “do something” online, we are generally forced into round-about processes. Say, for example, I want to email a friend to tell him about a new restaurant I went to, maybe even invite him to meet me there for lunch. To accomplish this task, I’d typically open up three or four tabs in Firefox, and maybe open ICal and Mail application windows too: I’d google the restaurant, find its phone number and address from yell.com; map its address using maps.google.com or similar; I’d check which date I’m free; and finally email him the info, copying and pasting links and map images between multiple tabs, and—if I’m not using gmail’s web interface—into other applications as well. If you followed that last sentence, you’re doing well: it’s long, and complex (technically complex-compound, but we won’t get pedantic here), and it reflects the process.

Although it’s a beta, and many of its functions are very much less-than-polished, it offers a glimpse of a possible interaction future, with drastically more simple processes to complete tasks. What it creates is the ability to interact with content more directly, so you can select some content and start telling the application to DO stuff TO the content, by typing. So, i can select a physical address and type: “map this” into Ubiquity, and it’ll pull up google maps for that address (at the moment, it’s having trouble with some UK addresses because it’s using google.com and therefore not contextualising through the .co.uk which works better for addresses here). I can then use that information on the same screen. I can “yell florists in birmingham” and have a list of flower vendors in Birmingham from Yell.com (yellow pages service), which I can then drop into an email or whatever.

Very quickly, I ran into a conceptual problem with Ubiquity’s idea of natural-language interaction, however. Their strapline is: “An experiment into connecting the Web with language.” The idea being that you can “tell” the computer to “do something with/to this information” or “command” for something to happen, changing the basic interaction metaphor from a visual click/drag/drop/open-window process to a linguistic “I’m telling the computer what I want and it happens” framework. My immediate reaction was: “This isn’t linguistic, it’s command-line”, and was instantly transported to trying to learn Linux without a technical background, with all the frustration of a non-technical user trying to interact with software using a command-line.

You see, from my perspective as a linguist, I often feel frustrated with the computing community’s view of what language actually is. Without exploring propositionality, conceptual metaphor framework or anything else, it’s sufficient to say that language is both simpler and more complex than anything we’ve got software to emulate yet. What Ubiquity actually is, is a very simplified command-line which is “aware” of the information you’re already interacting with. From that perspective, it seems to work very well, with a more streamlined set of commands and more “natural language” feel to the words you actually type.

The upshot of this is that users have to learn a set of commands to interact with their applications, but that these commands are intended to be transparent in meaning. So, you “map this” or “help” or “add 1PM lunch with Dave”. After reading some of the reasoning behind this from one of the designers, Aza Raskin, I started to appreciate it more and more. The current contrasting model to this “Linguistic Command Line” is menus and windows. Menus and windows are inefficient, if you think about it. You have to select text, or images or whatever and physically move your curser to a menu somewhere in the extreme side of a window on your screen, finding and selecting the command from a drop-down list from which you need to remember the path to each command. The problem accelerates when you incorporate windows and applications into this. So if I were to incorporate some text from one window into another, linking to the original, and maybe dropping in a customised image too; I’d have to open multiple windows, executing menu commands or application-specific keyboard “short-cuts” at each stage.

But, I already know what I want to do with the stuff, right? Why not just activate a single keyboard shortcut and begin typing your instructions to the system: send link to <email>. Ubiquity allows this. In this framework, Firefox becomes a bit of a microcosm of the operating system (with tabs being windows, and sites and web-apps being desktop applications). As you type, it short-lists commands, so you don’t even type the full thing: typing “t r a n” ends up with the translate, so you can skip it and begin typing “to eng”, and it will offer you “translate text to English”.

Now, imagine having this ability with any form of Linked Data? Imagine if that bit of text were automatically recognised as a date, or co-ordinates, or person. Imagine selecting a picture of a restaurant and typing: “invite fred for lunch at 3PM on monday, enter”. The system could automatically know that the picture was of a restaurant (whose profile could include co-ordinates, contact info, and even a hypothetical automatic table-reservation system for invites from the web), that fred is your colleague (whose FoaF profile includes email or instant messenger preferences),  that lunch is an email subject and a social event, and that 3PM on Monday is a date (in your calendar and in Fred’s calendar once the message is sent) which corresponds with your name + su. All of that information is being used in several processes (Copy/paste, lookup restaurant profile, map location, lookup email or IM, create iCal event, create email or IM message, send)  but all you’re really doing is : “inviting fred for lunch at 3PM on Monday.”

This is incredibly intriguing, because it begins to show how some systems can begin to scale up to the immensity of the Web. We, as people, know what we want to accomplish, and if we could just tell our computers that, we’d be much happier. I think this could be a first step, and while I’m not completely convinced with the command-line metaphor, I can see this as a definite step, and a different perspective. My new copy of  Aza’s father’s book the Humane Interface, arrived this morning to supplement this, and I’ll be blogging more about that, if it’s ever returned to my desk.

Person Michael Hausenblas

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At Talis, we’re very interested in the development of the Semantic Web, and we’re always happy when other members of this space share what they’re doing with us. I was contacted a couple weeks ago by Milan Stankovic, a member of the Good Old Ai research from Belgrade. He’s been working on the OPO (Online Presence Ontology), which aims to model the dynamic aspects of a user’s presence online: taking a leaf out of twitter’s book, but tying it in semantically with the rest of the web. I’ve asked him to share a bit about their project with us.

So, Milan, what is “online presence”, and in what way is it “dynamic”?

I think that expansion of socialising services, like social networks, Twitter, lifestreaming services, etc. has significantly changed the way we socialize. When our friends publish custom messages on social networks, send tweets or set their IM statuses, we become more aware of their current activities and thoughts. When we assemble all that information we get a rich image of their presence in the online world.

Since the data that forms this image is spread over different services (and often repeated) we came up with the idea that it could be useful to make a model for its semantic representation and meaningful exchange. So we created an ontology – the Online Presence Ontology (OPO) to enable the integration of those pieces of information about a user’s online presence. Apart from that, OPO also enables the transfer of online presence related data from one service to another without the loss of semantics.

We believe that with the expansion of internet-enabled mobile devices, as users are more and more online, the topic of online presence will gain even more importance. Maybe even new ways to express your state of being present online will arise in this context. For this reason we did our best to make OPO flexible and extensible enough to survive the evolution of the online presence concept itself.

So, does this have anything to do with the already-existing FOAF ontology?

For understanding OPO and the notion of online presence itself, a comparison to FOAF might be essential. It is very important to distinguish the static and more persistent properties modeled by FOAF (like name, gender, homepage, etc.) from frequently changing properties addressed by the OPO (like custom message and IM status). The OPO is actually meant for representing dynamic aspects of user profiles, and we may say that it complements FOAF in a way. It is therefore quite natural that OPO is connected to FOAF trough some properties.

How do you see this actually being implemented?

Apart from facilitating the integration of online presence data from various sources, OPO can also be beneficial for transferring data from one service to another. I personally know users who copy-paste their custom messages from gTalk to Facebook. This manual work is an annoyance we can easily relieve users from by introducing a meaningful data exchange between services. The first thing we need is a semantic representation and then the exchange mechanisms can be built on top of the ideas outlined by the Data Portability initiative.

The domain where we consider OPO’s contribution to be of greatest importance is the exchange of IM statuses. Currently different IM platforms use different status scales, and when users from different platforms meet in inter-platform chat (on services like Meebo, Digsby, etc.) their statuses are exchanged over XMPP protocol by mapping them all to a very poor status scale used in XMPP. In those mappings the semantics of original statuses is largely reduced. To face this issue OPO allows precise descriptions of IM status characteristics so that they can be meaningfully exchanged between platforms.

So, where are you taking this next?

We are currently working to extend the ontology with new features. One of the improvements will be the ability to add geographical location to your Online Presence. This will support travel twitting and will have its applications in recently emerged location based social networks.

Another interesting extension will be the support for describing current music track that users sometimes state on IM platforms. Compared to the existing possibility to see the name of the song my IM contacts are listening to, semantic representation of music should bring the functionality to a higher level, by allowing IM programs to find and let me play that music. The infrastructure for this is already provided by the Music Ontology project as well as DBTune; we just have to connect it with OPO.

We will soon put this new version of the ontology for public review on the project website and we hope to get community comments and attract the community to participate in making the ontology even more usable.

In parallel we are working on plugins for some social networks and IM programs in order to bring the enabled interoperability to life.

Thanks, Milan.

If you’d like to check out the ontology yourself, or to read more about it, you can find it here:
OPO Website : http://www.milanstankovic.org/opo/
OPO URI : http://ggg.milanstankovic.org/opo/ns/

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Ensemble is a 3-year, £1.5million publicly-funded research project so called because it brings together several universities and a multitude of research experience. One of its primary aims is to explore how the Semantic Web can be used to support education in general, and case-based pedagogy in particular.

It also looks like they’re after creating applications and developers’ tools about mid-way through the project: so they don’t seem to be in it for the purely theoretical!

We have some more information over on the Xiphos blog.

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Much of what I’ve been discussing here, and among my colleagues has centred around the explanation of the Semantic Web to a wider community than occurs within blog discussions, IRC chats, and the odd article in a technology magazine. Most of the discussions are aimed at the technologically-aware, and can wax complex.

Well, this morning I heard a classic description of the Semantic Web, in language which made it easy to follow. It made reference to the idea of linking data, and described the difference between a link between documents and a link between data. It even gave examples of how these linked data could be used by people in daily tasks. In short, it was a brilliant, brief and not-too-technical description of where the web is probably headed, and how it’s semantic future could affect normal people. It had the added kudos of having been an interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who was credited at the beginning of the short talk, with being the inventor of the World Wide Web.

It took me a few moments to realise the importance of this piece, however. As they were crediting Sir Tim, I thought: “Well, of course he’s invented the World Wide Web! Every geek already knows that!” That was when I realised I was not listening to a tech-cast from my ipod. I was listening to Radio 4’s Today Programme while driving to the office on the M42. What this meant, it slowly dawned on me, is that normal people were listening to this well-crafted explanation. The simple, yet complete description of the web’s adoption of this semantic future, and the way it could make such a difference to the way we interact with the vast quantities of data we produce and require was being presented on mainstream, FM radio during the morning commute!

For those who weren’t braving the torrential rain on the motorways, you can hear it in full here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7496000/7496976.stm. In brief, the interview featured a short introduction to the Semantic Web by the BBC science correspondent Tom Feilden, in which it was referred to as “the next generation of the web” which is “orders of magnitude more sophisticated and interconnected than what we have today.” This brief introduction was followed by a five or six-minute interview with Sir Tim.

It seemed that the interviewer brought out many of what might be considered “classic” questions about the Semantic Web: What makes it different from what we have now? How does the Data get there? (Does it need to be put up in a particular way?) That sounds scary: what happens if someone uses data you don’t want them to?

These three points allowed Sir Tim to quickly outline linked data—mentioning a subject close to Talis’ heart: Linking Open Data—giving examples of how this is different to linked documents and what that could mean for people. Following this, he explained standards with only a single mention of RDF. Finally, the interview touched on security and possible ways in which people and data might be be protected in future.

Towards the end, Sir Tim was asked a surprising question: Does the UK have the talent to compete in the upcoming changes?

“Of course it does!” I shouted at the radio. “We’re here! Mention all the work we’re doing!”

Well, of course Tim Berners-Lee is a modest man who has always been disinclined to advertise, leaving it up to me to mention three British companies which come to mind (Please mention more in the comments if you know of any!):

Garlik, identity experts based in Richmond, who are using semantic tech to great effect in handling online identity and security issues in the marketplace.

True Knowledge—based in Cambridge—are pioneering semantic search and seeking to improve the user’s experience when finding facts from complex questions.

And, of course, Talis (We’re in Birmingham, if you want to come and visit).

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Last week I listened to a talk by Shane Hipps, a Porsche “consumer anthropologist” turned Mennonite minister. The speaker, clearly aware of the contradictory nature of his background, made a very interesting observation about the digital age. He essentially said that we are, as a society, experiencing a shift of great magnitude in history which reflects one of the greatest changes humanity has ever experienced: literacy.

Moving from an oral tradition to a literate society—in which letters allow people to commit their thoughts to memory—fundamentally changed the way society and individuals thought. It freed individuals to think on their own without having to commit their ideas to the collective memory of their tribe. It also changed the ability of the social groups to sense the emotional state of its individuals, because they could now exist in an abstract, individual mindset.

So, agrarian societies relied on the community to remember and structure their ideas. The result of this community conceptual framework was an empathic connection between members of the community. Writing, on the other hand, allows individuals to remove themselves from the older framework and commit their thoughts to paper resulting in a loss or shift in the empathy of the culture or society. In a digital age, however, there is a new shift: one of removal to connection at a distance.

This concept: empathy at a distance or a digitally-connected community, made me consider the connections in the Semantic Web. The in’s and out’s of the SemWeb have been argued, discussed, debated, and explored technologically. Many blogs and sites have huge amounts of content devoted to the definitions of SPARQL and RDF. Abstractions have been published discussing the applications of this new technology. Sir Tim Berners-Lee refers to the Semantic Web as ‘The Web done right.’

But, what is being done right? Is the Semantic Web the Web done technologically right? Is it an upgrade to the existing framework or a patch to fix what was wrong? Maybe. But it makes me wonder about looking at this from a sociological or communicative perspective. The Semantic Web, technologically, is important to humanity only so far as it’s a medium for our connections.

So, when we make new semantic connections, and the software is increasingly able to associate us with concepts, people, items and communities (like academic institutions or or organisations); what is actually happening? People are making connections, and committing them not only to their own memories but to a community.

Publishing, you might argue, has been around since not that long after the first scribblings of meaning. But, publishing is one-way and narrow. A message or idea is only committed to the memories and added to the mental repertories of those who actually read the message. The same is true in a digital age (with multi-channels for ‘reading’ such as podcasts and video also) but the distinct difference is the access to concepts and the ease of utilising or ‘consuming’ the material. Firstly, digital goods are infinitely (in practice if not in absolute purist terms) copyable. There is no limit to the number of times you can copy and distribute an electronic text or a podcast so society does not have to wait for an idea to filter through because your dad hasn’t finished their Times crossword. Secondly, the connections made digitally (and more semantically-enriched) are increasingly collaborative. With software doing the heavy lifting in terms of data mining and content distribution, more ideas get to more people in more accessible ways.

Finally, although the Semantic Web is far from complete in application, the glimmers it allows us to see could have huge sociological implications. It’s the human element of the Semantic Web which makes it so exciting and so potentially disruptive. It’s possible that people, finding and synthesising ideas before feeding back their individual perspectives into the community, are increasingly able to connect with people and concepts in a more empathic way; without losing the abstract and logical abilities of the literate age.

Is this a new age? Undoubtedly. What will it look like? I’d say: like you and me—people.

Image: “karstadt connection” by rastafabi from Flickr—Creative Commons

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Looking at the world through a closed metaphor, like a walled garden, actually stops you from expanding the scope of possibilities available to the software you develop. This is because closed-world perspectives on data and meaning preclude the ability for further questioning. The answer to the question: “What don’t we know yet?” is not possible to answer. It’s capped at what you already know. The cause of this limit is the assumption that everything you don’t know is false, and it’s common to most software development.

This is a concept fundamentally at conflict with a ‘web’ metaphor or perspective. The idea of networked information (connected, accessible, linkable) could not get very far if the software logic balked at any new data, or any data which didn’t fit its pre-existing definitions.

A well-used example of this is asking a question about a person’s details which the system cannot know. So, if it is known that John is a citizen of the US; and you ask the system: “Is it true that John is a UK citizen?” a closed-world software solution will answer: “No.” However, an open-world perspective cannot definitively answer “no”, because it doesn’t know the answer–John might, for example, have dual-nationality.

Asking: “What else is there? Where can I find it? What can I do with it?” are fundamental to the Semantic Web, and to the way in which we go about creating it. Applications written for a limited data set can only ever answer questions asked about their data. In this sense, the current software development model exists within self-created walled gardens whose perimeters are set by the limit of software’s inquisitiveness.

Opening-up the limits could lead to a fundamental shift in metaphor for software. At the moment, all software agents are called ‘applications’. They ‘apply’ a logic to a set of data and spit out an answer. We think of them as automated beings like robots. They live in a world of data and work with what you feed them.

Perhaps if we move more toward a metaphor of a ‘perspective’, the open data web will begin to make more sense. Instead of designing robots to do tasks with your data, engineers can begin creating views on the data. Essentially, instead of designing, using and selling a robot to do something, they’d be creating, utilizing, and selling their perspective. Software would create a contextualized view on the data. It can manipulate the results by re-focusing the context and by including other aspects from other datasets into its calculations, but it doesn’t forget that the data it is using exists outside it’s computations.

Imagine opening up your laptop and clicking on the ‘perspectives’ folder to open up a PIM (Personal Information Manager like thunderbird or outlook). This PIM Perspective can look at the data about you, and apply a context to it. Allows you to view the data from a particular perspective. Finding the answer to ‘Am I free on Tuesday?” becomes a matter of ‘viewing’ the available information about your schedule on Tuesday within the context of events you have accepted to attend. This ‘view’ could then be further contextualized by adding further aspects to the Perspective: location/travel time, likelihood of proceeding events running over etc… Each aspect determines the ultimate view you have on the data for ‘Tuesday’. Instead of applying one bit of data (an event) on another bit of data (a date) and seeing if the data conflict, you get to ‘see’ the answer to your questions using existing data. The openness in this metaphor could include the fact that the data for an event lies outside the application’s resources. Say the event is a meeting organized by a company. If the company has published the event data, your PIM Application needs to import this information (you can either enter it, or accept an invitation) before adding it to its calculations. What then happens if the company cancels or moves the event location or meeting time? They have to re-send the information to all the attendees, who then have to modify their PIMs’ data. In an open-world, the data exists outside the PIM, so if the published information changes, the PIM’s Perspective changes accordingly.

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The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing on kind of thing in terms of another. -Lakoff and Johnson (1980)

Would you join me for a party?

It’s a black-tie, invite-only affair at the family estate. If you can make it, I’ll send you some directions and an invitation and a photo name-badge. Please don’t forget to bring it with you; there was an unfortunate incident last summer with a guest and the guards at the gate. Don’t worry, we don’t have those dogs any more: poor things had to be put down.

Sound inviting?

I’d like to explore the idea of Semantic Web metaphors. For a bit of background, I’m coming at this from the perspective that metaphor plays a key role in the way we think as well as the way we communicate. The idea of a ‘conceptual metaphor’ comes from Lakoff and Johnson and their collaborative Metaphors we Live By. The idea is that, because we’re all people, and all people are similar in many ways (we all have bodies, our bodies face in one direction, we perceive a huge amount of information by site) that we actually share common metaphorical constructions which allow our minds to deal with abstract concepts like time and numbers. Given the importance of these frameworks, it might be an idea to look at some common or easily-accessed technological metaphors and see how the Semantic Web fits in with these. This could help to explore the way we think and access the concepts behind the Semantic Web, and could inform the way we communicate about it.

The Semantic Web is not a Walled Garden.

The first metaphor I’d like to look at is actually a contrasting system: understanding the Semantic Web in terms of something it’s not: a walled garden.

In information technology, a ‘Walled Garden’ is a system which doesn’t link or accept links from an outside network. All the information inside is only available to members of that system and the content found within the system has to be admitted or imported. If we play around this walled garden metaphor, we can imagine seeing nice specimen plants with well-spaced labels and possibly some glass in between us and the more expensive displays. There might even be a gazebo with some exceedingly rare plants on display. To get in, you need to buy a ticket, and pay an extra fiver for a guide book. A lot of work went into the building of the garden and the arrangement and upkeep of the displays, so they’re charging for entry and keeping the best stuff for premium ticket holders.

This is exactly what happened at the beginning of the internet. Various internet service providers provided access to selected content, and graded it so they could charge for premium stuff. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this scenario, it’s a very standard arrangement and works well with people’s perceptions of how to access a service (like buying a ticket, or ordering a service like digital TV). The web, however, changed this perception as more and more people began to experience the freedom of accessing any information at any time. The WWW experienced a huge network effect as the walled-garden business model faded from the game-board.

The Walled Garden metaphor, however, could also be extended to include data systems, silos, basically anywhere data is kept in proprietary systems. The Web 2.0 ecosystem is filled with various walled gardens. Think of your favorite web app, and consider its characteristics. Which features only work within that system? What data can you access through the service?

Social networking sites and applications are particularly easy to categorize this way. How many networks are you registered with? LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace… Did any of these networks know who you were before you signed up? Did they know your friends until you told them? Can you point to a profile of a friend who’s not part of the system?

The basic business model of these walled gardens is to get as many people inside the walls as possible. So, if you’re friends with someone in one network, say Facebook, you can’t link your Facebook profile to a mate’s on Bebo or MySpace. These are separate gardens, each holding their own parties… and the owners can only cater for the invited guests. They’re happy for you to invite others (provided you give them their information); but they’re not out to through an open buffet to anyone who hasn’t signed the guest list!

“Wait!” I can hear you say: “What about when an application asks for my email address so it can find my friends?” Well, that’s exactly what it’s asking: for you to invite your friends to their party. There are even applications which have been built to link the walled gardens: but you have to be on their platform. Plaxo is an example of this. The idea is that you sign up to Plaxo (you join their garden party) and you tell them all the networks you’ve already joined (you give them your invitations to all the other parties). In a sense, you’re joining another party, which is essentially tracking all your invitations for you—they map the parties for you. The catch is that you have to join Plaxo for it to work, essentially seeing all the other gardens from the vantage of a slightly higher garden. The effect is that you get a map of all the other parties, but you still don’t get lunch!

The Semantic Web works from a different perspective. By being an open-world system, the Semantic Web works across the entire network (which, in this case, is the internet) using the entire web (the links created among content on the network: in this case: the WorldWideWeb!) The idea is that all the information you make available, and all that you have a link to is open to the entire network. The result is a removal of the ‘walls’ around content.

I would be very interested to hear what you think about how the Semantic Web relates to Walled Gardens, and in what ways you think it breaks down walls (or otherwise). Please feel not only free but invited to leave comments to join the discussion.

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As awareness of the Semantic Web grows within the technological community, it has also leaked into the mainstream media, with newspapers and broadcasters beginning to discuss (and ask fundamental questions) about the SemWeb itself.

Much of the coverage, from a techy’s perspective, misses the point, or is off, or just doesn’t share the vision or whatever. The problem is, the mainstream media (and the mainstream itself) is not composed primarily of techies! Most of the coverage of the rise of the Semantic Web has been generated by a very specific community—technology bloggers—who have their own perspectives on the sphere. The debate is raging, but it’s mainly contained within the echo chamber of the technological community.

When the attention of the rest of the world is jerked suddenly by the inclusion of the word ‘Semantic Web’ in an important event, or when a technology or process they already use is affected, they will seek to answer a fundamental set of questions: "What’s the Semantic Web? What does it mean to me? How can I get some?" From a techy’s perspective, these questions are laughable. It’s difficult to describe the Semantic Web, and mistaken to try to define it too closely. We know this: it’s abstract, amorphous, Beta, in development… we’re familiar. But, perhaps this is where the communication problem lies. The public, and the public’s media reflect their understanding by thinking of the Semantic Web as a product, or even a single entity. It’s seen as ‘the internet of tomorrow’ and is personalised: "it will know… it will suggest… it will do something for you. [1] You see, it’s a concept they’re trying to understand using all their familiar metaphors:

Semantic Web = Product, like a new PC, we can buy it and it will serve some purpose

Semantic Web = Service, like Digital TV, we pay for it and it enhances our lives

Semantic Web = Status Symbol, "I don’t know about you, but mine’s Semantic!" (this is reinforced by the idea of Web 3.0)

Media reflect their audience, and many of the journalists tasked with presenting breakthrough technologies struggle to get their heads around the mass of new vocabulary and ideas they need to process, so it’s understandable that they won’t always hit the nail. In fact, it is the journalists’ task to simplify, to generalise and even to translate the new technologies and opportunities to their general audiences. Many articles show this as they try to force the amorphous and abstract concepts presented to them into metaphors people can easily understand. Other articles, perhaps show where a journalist has made a mistake or hasn’t completely understood a concept. There was recently an article in The Times in which the views of Sir Tim Berners-Lee were misunderstood and mis-emphasized. He had to correct this in his blog, which, unfortunately, does not get seen by as many people as the Times. Finally, there do appear to be articles written by journalists and commentators who are frustrated or dismissive of the Semantic Web. Some of these posts and articles reflect less a misunderstanding (though that is certainly not completely removed) and more a hasty judgement or an arbitrarily-chosen perspective.

Now, it lies with the technological community to try to get the messages straight about the semantic web. We need to be tying into publicly-accessible metaphors to get people to understand the SemWeb better. It’s not that they’re completely mistaken: The semantic web is new, and will make our lives better, and is a service… it’s just that these metaphors don’t capture most of it… or even the core meanings. It’s all about getting the meaning of the new technologies out in a clearer way.

It’s ironic, really, that the Semantic Web should struggle so much with semantics!

The problem is that if we present a mixed, complicated, and difficult concept forward, the journalists and media commentators are not going to be able to sort out the tangle of meanings for us. They will present an (over)simplified, half-understood message to the rest of the world. When even a brilliant communicator like Tim Berners-Lee’s message gets scrambled, maybe it’s time to take stock in how we present the Semantic Web, especially to the general media. Maybe, a set of metaphors could help us present these:

The semantic web is a platform (one we already use frequently)! The semantic web is a layer of connectivity (like a concentric ring around the web itself). The semantic web is a series (more than one thing) of enablers (it makes possible, rather than it does)

There are loads more, I’m sure, which could help to present our ideas about the Semantic Web. For inspiration, watch Tim Berners-Lee’s talk about what he sees as the Semantic Web. Feel free to share yours here too.

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Zach Beauvais: I started work at Talis this last week as a researcher for the Platform, and will be mainly involved in communication about the Semantic Web in general as well as hopefully facilitating discussions about the Talis Platform.

Before joining Talis, I worked on the web and did some freelance blogging. Before that I went to university in London where I studied linguistics; and just before that, I moved from the US to the UK. For personals: I live in beautiful Shropshire, am married to a wonderful Vet, and am completely addicted to coffee and coffee-related gadgets. For more, I have a personal blog, where I talk about my latest ideas about metaphor and communication, the web, and other topics.

I will be posting to the Nodalities blog in short order, and will try to cover a range of general topics involving the Semantic Web, and will hopefully bring a non-developmental perspective to the discussions. I’ll also be helping Ian Davis and Paul Miller with bits and pieces, and if anyone sees anything they think I’d like to blog about, please do send it my way: zach.beauvais@talis.com

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