Details
Kingsley Uyi Idehen
Lexington, United States
Subscribe
Post Categories
Subscribe
Recent Articles
Display Settings
|
Web 2.0's Open Data Access Conundrum
Open Data Access and Web 2.0 have a very strange relationship
that continues to blur the lines of demarcation between where Web
2.0 ends and where Web.Next (i.e Web 3.0, Semantic/Data Web, Web of
Databases etc.) starts. But before I proceed, let me attempt to
define Web 2.0 one more time:
A phase in the evolution web
usage patterns that emphasizes Web Services based interaction
between “Web Users” and “Points of Web Presence” over traditional
“Web Users” and “Web Sites” based interaction. Basically, a
transition from visual site interaction to presence based
interaction.
BTW - Dare Obasanjo also commented about Web usage patterns in
his post titled:
The Two Webs. Where he concluded that we had a dichotomy along
the lines of: HTTP-for-APIs (2.0) and HTTP-for-Browsers (1.0).
Which Jon Udell
evolved into: HTTP-Services-Web and HTTP-Intereactive-Web during
our recent podcast
conversation.
With definitions in place, I will resume my quest to unveil the
aforementioned Web 2.0 Data Access Conundrum:
- Emphasis on XML's prowess in the realms of Data and Protocol
Modeling alongside Data Representation. Especially as SOAP or REST
styles of Web Services and various XML formats (RSS
0.92/1.0/1.1/2.0, Atom, OPML, OCS etc.) collectively define the Web
2.0 infrastructure landscape
- Where a modicum of Data Access appreciation and comprehension
does exist it is inherently compromised by business models that
mandate some form of “Walled Gardens” and “Data Silos”
- Mash-ups are a response to said “Walled Gardens” and “Data
Silos” . Mash-ups by definition imply combining things that were
not built for recombination.
As you can see from the above, Open Data access isn't genuinely
compatible with Web 2.0.
We can also look at the same issue by way of the popular M-V-C
(Model View Controller) pattern. Web 2.0 is all about the “V” and
“C” with a modicum of “M” at best (data access, open data access,
and flexible open data access are completely separate things). The
“C” items represent application logic exposed by SOAP or REST style
web services etc. I'll return to this later in this post.
What about Social Networking you must be thinking? Isn't this a
Web 2.0 manifestation? Not at all (IMHO). The Web was developed /
invented by Tim Berners-Lee to leverage the “Network Effects”
potential of the Internet for connecting People and Data.
Social Networking on the other hand, is simply one of several ways
by which construct network connections. I am sure we all accept the
fact that connections are built for many other reasons beyond
social interaction. That said, we also know that through social
interactions we actually develop some of our most valuable
relationships (we are social creatures after-all).
The Web 2.0 Open Data Access impedance reality is ultimately
going to be the greatest piece of tutorial and usecase material for
the Semantic Web. I take this position because it is human nature
to seek Freedom (in unadulterated form) which implies the
following:
- Access Data from a myriad of data sources (irrespective of
structural differences at the database level)
- Mesh (not Mash) data in new and interesting ways
- Share the meshed data with as many relevant people as possible
for social, professional, political, religious, and other
reasons
- Construct valuable networks based on data oriented
connections
Web 2.0 by definition and use case scenarios is inherently
incompatible with the above due to the lack of Flexible and Open
Data Access.
If we take the definition of Web 2.0 (above) and rework it with
an appreciation Flexible and Open Data Access you would arrive at
something like this:
A phase in the evolution of the
web that emphasizes interaction between “Web Users” and “Web Data”
facilitated by Web Services based APIs and an Open & Flexible
Data Access Model “.
In more succinct form:
A pervasive network of people
connected by data or data connected by people.
Returning to M-V-C and looking at the definition
above, you now have a complete of ”M“ which is enigmatic in Web 2.0
and the essence of the Semantic Web (Data and Context).
To make all of this possible a palatable Data Model is required.
The model of choice is the Graph based RDF Data Model - not to be
mistaken for the RDF/XML serialization which is just that, a data
serialization that conforms to the aforementioned RDF data
model.
The Enterprise Challenge
Web 2.0 cannot and will not make valuable inroads into the the
enterprise because enterprises live and die by their ability to
exploit data. Weblogs, Wikis, Shared Bookmarking Systems, and other
Web 2.0 distributed collaborative applications profiles are only
valuable if the data is available to the enterprise for meshing
(not mashing).
A good example of how enterprises will exploit data by
leveraging networks of people and data (social networks in this
case) is shown in this nice presentation by Accenture's Institute
for High Performance Business titled: Visualizing
Organizational Change.
Web 2.0 commentators (for the most part) continue to ponder the
use of Web 2.0 within the enterprise while forgetting the
congruency between enterprise agility and exploitation of people
& data networks (The very issue emphasized in this original
Web vision
document by Tim Berners-Lee). Even worse, they remain
challenged or spooked by the Semantic Web vision because they do
not understand that Web 2.0 is fundamentally a Semantic Web
precursor due to Open Data Access challenges. Web 2.0 is one of the
greatest demonstrations of why we need the Semantic Web at the
current time.
Finally, juxtapose the items below and you may even get a
clearer view of what I am an attempting to convey about the virtues
of Open Data Access and the inflective role it plays as we move
beyond Web 2.0:
Information
Management Proposal - Tim Berners-Lee
Visualizing
Organizational Change -
Accenture Institute of High Performance Business
09/02/2006 16:47 GMT-0500 |
Modified: 11/16/2006 15:51
GMT-0500 |
Data Spaces and Web of Databases
Note: An updated version of a previously unpublished blog
post:
Continuing from our recent
Podcast conversation, Jon Udell sheds further insight into the
essence of our conversation via a “Strategic Developer” column
article titled:
Accessing the web of databases.
Below, I present an initial dump of a DataSpace FAQ below that
hopefully sheds light on the DataSpace vision espoused during my
podcast conversation with Jon.
What is a DataSpace?
A moniker for Web-accessible atomic containers that manage and
expose Data, Information, Services, Processes, and Knowledge.
What would you typically find in a Data Space? Examples
include:
- Raw Data - SQL, HTML, XML (raw), XHTML, RDF etc.
- Information (Data In Context) - XHTML (various microformats),
Blog Posts (in RSS, Atom, RSS-RDF formats), Subscription Lists
(OPML, OCS, etc), Social Networks (FOAF, XFN etc.), and many other
forms of applied XML.
- Web Services (Application/Service Logic) - REST or SOAP based
invocation of application logic for context sensitive and
controlled data access and manipulation.
- Persisted Knowledge - Information in actionable context that is
also available in transient or persistent forms expressed using a
Graph Data Model. A modern knowledgebase would more than likely
have RDF as its Data Language, RDFS as its Schema Language, and OWL
as its Domain Definition (Ontology) Language. Actual Domain,
Schema, and Instance Data would be serialized using formats such as
RDF-XML, N3, Turtle etc).
How do Data Spaces and Databases differ?
Data Spaces are fundamentally problem-domain-specific database
applications. They offer functionality that you would instinctively
expect of a database (e.g. AICD data management) with the additonal
benefit of being data model and query language agnostic. Data
Spaces are for the most part DBMS Engine and Data Access Middleware
hybrids in the sense that ownership and control of data is
inherently loosely-coupled.
How do Data Spaces and Content Management Systems differ?
Data Spaces are inherently more flexible, they support multiple
data models and data representation formats. Content management
systems do not possess the same degree of data model and data
representation dexterity.
How do Data Spaces and Knowledgebases differ?
A Data Space cannot dictate the perception of its content. For
instance, what I may consider as knowledge relative to my Data
Space may not be the case to a remote client that interacts with it
from a distance, Thus, defining my Data Space as Knowledgebase,
purely, introduces constraints that reduce its broader
effectiveness to third party clients (applications, services, users
etc..). A Knowledgebase is based on a Graph Data Model resulting in
significant impedance for clients that are built around alternative
models. To reiterate, Data Spaces support multiple data models.
What Architectural Components make up a Data Space?
- ORDBMS Engine - for Data Modeling agility (via complex purpose
specific data types and data access methods), Data Atomicity, Data
Concurrency, Transaction Isolation, and Durability (aka
ACID).
- Virtual Database Engine - for creating a single view of, and
access point to, heterogeneous SQL, XML, Free Text, and other data.
This is all about Virtualization at the Data Access Level.
- Web Services Platform - enabling controlled access and
manipulation (via application, service, or protocol logic) of
Virtualized or Disparate Data. This layer handles the decoupling of
functionality from monolithic wholes for function specific
invocation via Web Services using either the SOAP or REST
approach.
Where do Data Spaces fit into the Web's rapid evolution?
They are an essential part of the burgeoning Data Web / Semantic
Web. In short, they will take us from data “Mash-ups” (combining
web accessible data that exists without integration and repurposing
in mind) to “Mesh-ups” (combining web accessible data that exists
with integration and repurposing in mind).
Where can I see a DataSpace along the lines described, in
action?
Just look at my blog, and take the journey as follows:
What about other Data Spaces?
There are several and I will attempt to categorize along the
lines of query method available:
Type 1 (Free Text Search over HTTP):
Google, MSN, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, and most Web 2.0 plays .
Type 2 (Free Text Search and XQuery/XPath over HTTP)
A few blogs and Wikis (Jon Udell's and a few others)
Type 3 (RDF Data Sets and SPARQL Queryable):
Type 4 (Generic Free Text Search, OpenSearch, GData, XQuery/XPath,
and SPARQL):
Points of Semantic Web presence such as the Data Spaces at:
What About Data Space aware tools?
- OpenLink Ajax
Toolkit - provides Javascript Control level binding to Query
Services such as XMLA for SQL, GData for Free Text, OpenSearch for
Free Text, SPARQL for RDF, in addition to service specific Web
Services (Web 2.0 hosted solutions that expose service specific
APIs)
- Semantic
Radar - a Firefox Extension
- PingTheSemantic - the Semantic
Webs equivalent of Web 2.0's weblogs.com
- PiggyBank - a Firefox
Extension
08/28/2006 19:38 GMT-0500 |
Modified: 09/04/2006 18:58
GMT-0500 |
Standards as social contracts
Standards as social contracts: "Looking at Dave Winer's efforts
in evangelizing OPML, I try to draw some rough lines into what
makes a de-facto standard. De Facto standards are made and seldom
happen on their own. In this entry, I look back at the history of
HTML, RSS, the open source movement and try to draw some lines as
to what makes a standard.
"
(Via Tristan Louis.)
I posted a comment to the Tristan Louis' post along the
following lines:
Analysis is spot on re. the link between de facto
standardization and bootstrapping. Likewise, the clear linkage
between boostrapping and connected communities (a variation of the
social networking paradigm).
Dave built a community around a XML content syndication and
subscription usecase demo that we know today as the blogosphere.
Superficially, one may conclude that Semantic Web vision has
suffered to date from a lack a similar bootstrap effort. Whereas in
reality, we are dealing with "time and context" issues that are
critical to the base understanding upon which a "Dave Winer" style
bootstrap for the Semantic Web would occur.
Personally, I see the emergence of Web 2.0 (esp. the mashups
phenomenon) as the "time and context" seeds from which the Semantic
Web bootstrap will sprout. I see shared ontologies such as FOAF and SIOC leading the way (they are the RSS
2.0's of the Semantic Web IMHO).
07/04/2006 17:25 GMT-0500 |
Modified: 07/04/2006 14:53
GMT-0500 |
SPARQL Parameterized Queries (Virtuoso using SPARQL in SQL)
SPARQL with SQL (Inline)
Virtuoso extends its SQL3 implementation with syntax for
integrating SPARQL into queries and subqueries.Thus, as part of a
SQL SELECT query or subquery, one can write the SPARQL keyword and
a SPARQL query as part of query text processed by Virtuoso's SQL
Query Processor.
Example 1 (basic) :
Using Virtuoso's Command line or the Web Based ISQL utility type
in the following (note: "SQL>" is the command line prompt for
the native ISQL utility):
SQL> sparql select distinct ?p where { graph ?g { ?s ?p ?o } };
Which will return the following:
p varchar
----------
http://example.org/ns#b
http://example.org/ns#d
http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name
http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/mbox
...
Example 2 (a subquery variation):
SQL> select distinct subseq (p, strchr (p, '#')) as fragment
from (sparql select distinct ?p where { graph ?g { ?s ?p ?o } } ) as all_predicates
where p like '%#%' ;
fragment varchar
----------
#query
#data
#name
#comment
...
Parameterized Queries:
You can pass parameters to a SPARQL query using a
Virtuoso-specific syntax extension. '??' or '$?' indicates a
positional parameter similar to '?' in standard SQL. '??' can be
used in graph patterns or anywhere else where a SPARQL variable is
accepted. The value of a parameter should be passed in SQL form,
i.e. this should be a number or an untyped string. An IRI ID can
not be passed, but an absolute IRI can. Using this notation, a
dynamic SQL capable client (ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, OLEDB, XMLA, or
others) can execute parametrized SPARQL queries using parameter
binding concepts that are common place in dynamic SQL. Which
implies that existing SQL applications and development environments
(PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, VB, C#, Java, etc.) are capable of
issuing SPARQL queries via their existing SQL bound data access
channels against RDF Data stored in Virtuoso.
Note: This is the Virtuoso equivalent of a
recently published example using Jena (a Java based RDF Triple
Store).
Example:
Create a Virtuoso Function by execting the following:
SQL> create function param_passing_demo ();
{
declare stat, msg varchar;
declare mdata, rset any;
exec ('sparql select ?s where { graph ?g { ?s ?? ?? }}',
stat, msg,
vector ('http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/DataAccess/tests/data/Sorting/sort-0#int1',
4 ), -- Vector of two parameters
10, -- Max. result-set rows
mdata, -- Variable for handling result-set metadata
rset -- Variable for handling query result-set
);
return rset[0][0];
}
Test new "param_passing_demo" function by executing the
following:
SQL> select param_passing_demo ();
Which returns:
callret VARCHAR
_______________________________________________________________________________
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/DataAccess/tests/data/Sorting/sort-0#four
1 Rows. -- 00000 msec.
Using SPARQL in SQL Predicates:
A SPARQL ASK query can be used as an argument of the SQL EXISTS
predicate.
create function sparql_ask_demo () returns varchar
{
if (exists (sparql ask where { graph ?g { ?s ?p 4}})) return 'YES';
else return 'NO';
};
Test by executing:
SQL> select sparql_ask_demo ();
Which returns:
_________________________
YES
05/11/2006 18:54 GMT-0500 |
Modified: 06/22/2006 08:56
GMT-0500 |
Swoogle knows how Semantic Web ontologies are used
Swoogle knows how Semantic Web ontologies are used: "
The Dublin Core Metadata
Initiative is updating the RDF expression of DC and might add
range restrictions to some properties. Mikael Nilsson wondered if
we would use the Swoogle
Semantic Web search engine to see what types of values are
being used with DC properties.
This kind of query is just the ticket for Swoogle. Well, almost.
The current web-based interface supports a limited number of query
types. Many more can be asked if you use SQL directly to query
Swoogle’s underlying databases. We don’t want to provide a direct
SQL query service over the main Swoogle database because it’s easy
to ask a query that will take a looooooong time to answer and some
could even crash the database server. We are planning to put up a
second server with a copy of the database and we give Swoogle
Power Users (SPUs) access to it.
We ran a simple SQL query to generate some initial data for
Mikael showing fall of the DC properties. For each one, we list all
of the ranges that values were drawn from and the number of
separate documents and triples for each combination. For
example
Property
|
Range
|
Documents
|
Triples
|
dc:creater |
rdfs:Literal |
32
|
648
|
dc:creator |
rdfs:Literal |
234655
|
2477665
|
dc:creator |
wn:Person |
2714
|
1138250
|
dc:creator |
cc:Agent |
4090
|
6359
|
dc:creator |
foaf:Person |
2281
|
5969
|
dc:creator |
foaf:Agent |
1723
|
3234
|
Notice that the first property in this partial table is an
obvious typo. You can see the complete table as
pdf file or as an excel
spreadsheet.
[Tim Finin, UMBC ebiquity lab]
"
(Via Planet RDF.)
04/05/2006 20:00 GMT-0500 |
Modified: 06/22/2006 08:56
GMT-0500 |
This Week’s Semantic Web
(Via Danny Ayers.):
This Week’s Semantic Web:
"Ok, my first attempt at a round-up (in response to Phil’s
observation of Planetary damage).
Thanks to the conference there’s loads more here than there’s
likely to be subsequent weeks, although it’s still only a fairly
random sample and some of the links here are to heaps of other
resources…
Incidentally, if anyone’s got a list/links for SemWeb-related
blogs that aren’t on Planet RDF,
I’d be grateful for a pointer. PS. Ok, I forget… are there any
blogs that aren’t on Dave’s list
yet..?
Quote of the week:
In the Semantic Web, it is not the Semantic which is new, it is
the Web which is new.
- Chris
Welty, IBM (lifted from TimBL’s slides)
Events
Docs etc
- Conference highlights on the #swig chump: 2005-11-06,
-07,
-08,
-09,
-10; Ian’s
notes; John’s
resources;
Leo’s stories; Uldis’
call to action; del.icio.us/iswc2005;
flickr/iswc2005;
foaf-moblog.
- Slides from Sir TimBL’s conference keynotes: Semantic Web for the
Industry, Putting the Web back
in Semantic Web
- Daniel Weitzner’s keynote: Privacy,
Provenance, Property and Personhood
- Long-time SW researcher Stefan Decker now has a blog,
inspirationally entitled Stefan Decker on the Semantic
Web. (Stefan’s one of the head honchos at DERI). Sample snippet:
I just noticed the article from Dan Zambonini ‘Is
Web 2.0 killing the Semantic Web?‘. From my perspective the
article shows a misconception that people seems to have around the
Semantic Web: the Semantic Web effort itself is not provide
applications (like the
Web 2.0 meme indicates) - it rather provides standards to
interlink applications.
- Leigh Dodds has two pieces demonstrating neat facilities
offered by ARQ the
SPARQL query API for Java: parameterised
queries and extension
functions.
- A new W3C Working Group has been chartered: Rule Interchange Format
WG - ’ to produce a core rule language plus extensions
which together allow rules to be translated between rule languages
and thus transferred between rule systems.’. As noted by
dajobe, phase 1
includes making a new XML syntax for RDF…
-
UMBC
Semantic Web Reference Card - if you only print one thing
this year…or did you already do the SPARQL Reference
card..?
-
WebDescription - root
wiki page for collecting notes on web description languages (ESW
Wiki,
announcement)
-
Bot - IRC/Jabber chat
bots that are either in use by Semantic Web developers or use
Semantic Web technologies (ESW Wiki)
-
microformat
FAQs for RDF fans (ESW Wiki)
- W3C working draft : WSDL 2.0 - RDF Mapping
- SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organisation System) updated drafts:
SKOS Core
Vocabulary Specification, SKOS Core
Guide
- working draft: SPARQL
Protocol for RDF Using WSDL 1.1
-
A
relational algebra for SPARQL, Note on
database layouts for SPARQL datastores (PDFs, Richard Cyganiak,
HP)
-
Amateur Fiction
Online - The Web of Community Trust A Case Study in Community
Focused Design for the SemanticWeb (PDF)
-
Building a Semantic Wiki - IEEE article. See also: SemperWiki - Semantic Personal
Wiki, WikSAR - Towards a
Semantic Wiki Experience
Software and stuff
-
Semantic Web
Challenge applications (winner: CONFOTO - congrats bengee!)
-
Piggy Bank
2.1.1 released.
-
IRIS is a semantic
desktop application framework that enables users to create a
‘personal map’ across their office-related information objects.
IRIS includes a machine-learning platform to help automate this
process. It provides ‘dashboard’ views, contextual navigation, and
relationship-based structure across an extensible suite of office
applications, including a calendar, web and file browser, e-mail
client, and instant messaging client.
(open source release due Jan 2006)
-
MKSearch - ‘A
new kind of search engine’ - RDF-backed (Sesame) with Web
crawler, extracts and indexes metadata.
-
FOAFRealm - Our goal is
to design and implement D-FOAF, a distributed authentication and
trust infrastructure without a centralised authority. D-FOAF will
be a backbone for trust applications based on social relationships
and will establish identity of users similar to the way we
establish identify and trust in real life.
- Perl Net::Flickr::RDF
- WordPress SIOC
(Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) plugin updated (just
copy wp-sioc.php
into the root of your WP install and it just works)
-
OntoMedia is
intended for the representation of heterogenous media through
description of the semantic content of that media. The
representation may be limited to the description of some or all of
the elements contained within the source or may include information
regarding the narrative relationship that these elements have both
to the media and to each other.
-
mSpace is an interaction model
to help explore relationships in information - ‘Imagine Google
on iTunes’
Blog post title of the week:
Don’t give me
that monkey-ass Web 1.0, either
- Uche Ogbuji
Also…a new threat to Semantic Web developers has been
discovered: typhoid!,
and the key to the Web’s full potential is…Tetris."
11/14/2005 19:44 GMT-0500 |
Modified: 06/22/2006 08:56
GMT-0500 |
Breaking the Web Wide Open!
Marc Canter's Breaking
the Web Wide Open! article is something I found pretty late (by
my normal discovery standards). This was partly due to the pre- and
post- Web 2.0 event noise levels that have dumped the description
of an important industry inflection into the "Bozo Bin" of many.
Personally, I think we shouldn't confuse the Web 2.0
traditional-pitch-fest conference with an attempt to identify an
important industry inflection).
Anyway, Marc's article is a very refreshing read because it
provides a really good insight into the general landscape of a
rapidly evolving Web alongside genuine appreciation of our broader
timeless pursuit of "Openness".
To really help this document provide additional value have
scrapped the content of the original post and dumped it below so
that we can appreciate the value of the links embedded within the
article (note: thanks to Virtuoso I only had to paste the content
into my blog, the extraction to my Linkblog
and Blog
Summary Pages are simply features of my Virtuoso based Blog
Engine):
Breaking the Web Wide
Open! (complete story)
Even the web giants like AOL, Google, MSN, and Yahoo need to
observe these open standards, or they'll risk becoming the "walled
gardens" of the new web and be coolio no more.
Marc Canter
[Broadband
Mechanics, Inc.] | POSTED: 09.26.05 @12:00
Editorial Note: Several months ago, AlwaysOn got
a personal invitation from Yahoo founder Jerry Yang "to see and
give us feedback on our new social media product, y!360." We were
happy to oblige and dutifully showed up, joining a conference room
full of hard-core bloggers and new, new media types. The geeks gave
Yahoo 360 an overwhelming thumbs down, with comments like, "So the
only services I can use within this new network are Yahoo services?
What if I don't use Yahoo IM?" In essence, the Yahoo team was booed
for being "closed web," and we heartily agreed. With Yahoo 360,
Yahoo continues building its own "walled garden" to control its 135
million customersan accusation also hurled at AOL in the early
1990s, before AOL migrated its private network service onto the
web. As the Economist recently noted, "Yahoo, in
short, has old media plans for the new-media era."
The irony to our view here is, of course, that today's AO Network
is also a "closed web." In the end, Mr. Yang's thoughtful
invitation and our ensuing disappointment in his new service led to
the assignment of this article. It also confirmed our existing plan
to completely revamp the AO Network around open standards. To tie
it all together, we recruited the chief architect of our new site,
the notorious Marc Canter, to pen this piece.
We look forward to our reader feedback.
Breaking the Web Wide Open!
By Marc Canter
For decades, "walled gardens" of proprietary standards and content
have been the strategy of dominant players in mainframe computer
software, wireless telecommunications services, and the World Wide
Webit was their successful lock-in strategy of keeping their
customers theirs. But like it or not, those walls are tumbling
down. Open web standards are being adopted so widely, with such
value and impact, that the web giantsAmazon, AOL, eBay, Google,
Microsoft, and Yahooare facing the difficult decision of opening
up to what they don't control.
The online world is evolving into a new open web (sometimes called
the Web 2.0), which is all about being personalized and customized
for each user. Not only open source software, but open
standardsare becoming an essential component.
Many of the web giants have been using open source software for
years. Most of them use at least parts of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/Python/PHP) stack,
even if they aren't well-known for giving back to the open source
community. For these incumbents that grew big on proprietary web
services, the methods, practices, and applications of open source
software development are difficult to fully adopt. And the next
open source movementswhich will be as much about open standards as
about codewill be a lot harder for the incumbents to
exploit.
While the incumbents use cheap open source software to run their
back-ends systems, their business models largely depend on
proprietary software and algorithms. But our view a new slew of
open software, open protocols, and open standards will confront the
incumbents with the classic Innovator's Dilemma. Should they adopt these
tools and standards, painfully cannibalizing their existing revenue
for a new unproven concept, or should they stick with their
currently lucrative model with the risk that eventually a bunch of
upstarts eat their lunch?
Credit should go to several of the web giants who have been making
efforts to "open up." Google, Yahoo, eBay, and Amazon all have Open
APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) built into their data and
systems. Any software developer can access and use them for
whatever creative purposes they wish. This means that the API
provider becomes an open platform for everyone to use and build on
top of. This notion has expanded like wildfire throughout the
blogosphere, so nowadays, Open APIs are pretty much required.
Other incumbents also have open strategies. AOL has got the RSS
religion, providing a feedreader and RSS search in order
to escape the "walled garden of content" stigma. Apple now
incorporates podcasts, the "personal radio shows" that are
latest rage in audio narrowcasting, into iTunes. Even Microsoft is
supporting open standards, for example by endorsing SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) for
internet telephony and conferencing over Skype's proprietary
format or one of its own devising.
But new open standards and protocols are in use, under
construction, or being proposed every day, pushing the envelope of
where we are right now. Many of these standards are coming from
startup companies and small groups of developers, not from the
giants. Together with the Open APIs, those new standards will
contribute to a new, open infrastructure. Tens of thousands of
developers will use and improve this open infrastructure to create
new kinds of web-based applications and services, to offer web
users a highly personalized online experience.
A Brief History of Openness
At this point, I have to admit that I am not just a passive
observer, full-time journalist or "just some blogger"but an active
evangelist and developer of these standards. It's the vision of
"open infrastructure" that's driving my
company and the reason why I'm writing this article. This
article will give you some of the background behind on these
standards, and what the evolution of the next generation of open
standards will look like.
Starting back in the 1980s, establishing a software standard was a
key strategy for any software company. My former company, MacroMind
(which became Macromedia), achieved this goal early on with
Director. As Director evolved into Flash, the world saw that
other companies besides Microsoft, Adobe, and Apple could establish
true cross-platform, independent media standards.
Then Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen came along, and changed the rules of
the software business and of entrepreneurialism. No matter how
entrenched and "standardized" software was, the rug could still get
pulled out from under it. Netscape did it to Microsoft, and then Microsoft
did it back to Netscape. The web evolved, and lots
of standards evolved with it. The leading open source standards
(such as the LAMP stack) became widely used alternatives to
proprietary closed-source offerings.
Open standards are more than just technology. Open standards mean
sharing, empowering, and community support. Someone floats a new
idea (or meme) and the community runs with it – with each
person making their own contributions to the standard – evolving it
without a moment's hesitation about "giving away their intellectual
property."
One good example of this was Dave Sifry, who built the Technorati
blog-tracking technology inspired by the Blogging
Ecosystem, a weekend project by young hacker Phil Pearson. Dave liked what he saw and he ran
with itturning Technorati into what it is today.
Dave Winer has contributed enormously to this area of
open standards. He defined and personally created several open
standards and protocolssuch as RSS, OPML, and XML-RPC. Dave has
also helped build the blogosphere through his enthusiasm
and passion.
By 2003, hundreds of programmers were working on creating and
establishing new standards for almost everything. The best of these
new standards have evolved into compelling web services platforms –
such as del.icio.us, Webjay, or Flickr. Some have even spun off formal standards –
like XSPF (a standard for playlists) or instant messaging standard
XMPP (also known as Jabber).
Today's Open APIs are complemented by standardized Schemasthe
structure of the data itself and its associated meta-data. Take for
example a podcasting feed. It consists of: a) the radio show
itself, b) information on who is on the show, what the show is
about and how long the show is (the meta-data) and also c) API
calls to retrieve a show (a single feed item) and play it from a
specified server.
The combination of Open APIs, standardized schemas for handling
meta-data, and an industry which agrees on these standards are
breaking the web wide open right now. So what new open standards
should the web incumbentsand yoube watching? Keep an eye on the
following developments:
Identity
Attention
Open Media
Microcontent Publishing
Open Social Networks
Tags
Pinging
Routing
Open Communications
Device Management and Control
1. Identity
Right now, you don't really control your own online identity. At
the core of just about every online piece of software is a
membership system. Some systems allow you to browse a site
anonymouslybut unless you register with the site you can't do
things like search for an article, post a comment, buy something,
or review it. The problem is that each and every site has its own
membership system. So you constantly have to register with new
systems, which cannot share dataeven you'd want them to. By
establishing a "single sign-on" standard, disparate sites can
allow users to freely move from site to site, and let them control
the movement of their personal profile data, as well as any other
data they've created.
With Passport, Microsoft unsuccessfully attempted to
force its proprietary standard on the industry. Instead, a world is
evolving where most people assume that users want to control their
own data, whether that data is their profile, their blog posts and
photos, or some collection of their past interactions, purchases,
and recommendations. As long as users can control their digital
identity, any kind of service or interaction can be layered on top
of it.
Identity 2.0 is all about users controlling their own
profile data and becoming their own agents. This way the users
themselves, rather than other intermediaries, will profit from
their ID info. Once developers start offering single sign-on to
their users, and users have trusted places to store their
datawhich respect the limits and provide access controls over that
data, users will be able to access personalized services which will
understand and use their personal data.
Identity 2.0 may seem like some geeky, visionary future standard
that isn't defined yet, but by putting each user's digital identity
at the core of all their online experiences, Identity 2.0 is
becoming the cornerstone of the new open web.
The Initiatives:
Right now, Identity 2.0 is under construction through various
efforts from Microsoft (the "InfoCard" component built into the Vista operating
system and its "Identity Metasystem"), Sxip Identity, Identity
Commons, Liberty Alliance, LID (NetMesh's Lightweight ID), and SixApart's
OpenID.
More Movers and Shakers:
Identity Commons and Kaliya Hamlin, Sxip Identity and Dick Hardt, the
Identity
Gang and Doc Searls, Microsoft's Kim Cameron,
Craig
Burton, Phil
Windley, and Brad Fitzpatrick, to name a few.
2. Attention
How many readers know what their online attention is worth? If you
don't, Google and Yahoo dothey make their living off our
attention. They know what we're searching for, happily turn it into
a keyword, and sell that keyword to advertisers. They make money
off our attention. We don't.
Technorati and friends proposed an
attention standard, Attention.xml, designed to "help you keep
track of what you've read, what you're spending time on, and what
you should be paying attention to." AttentionTrust is
an effort by Steve Gillmor and Seth Goldstein to standardize on how captured
end-user performance, browsing, and interest data are used.
Blogger Peter Caputa gives a good summary of
AttentionTrust:
"As we use the web, we reveal lots of information about
ourselves by what we pay attention to. Imagine if all of that
information could be stored in a nice neat little xml file. And
when we travel around the web, we can optionally share it with
websites or other people. We can make them pay for it, lease it ...
we get to decide who has access to it, how long they have access to
it, and what we want in return. And they have to tell us what they
are going to do with our Attention data."
So when you give your attention to sites that adhere to the
AttentionTrust, your attention rights (you own your attention,
you can move your attention, you can pay attention and be paid for
it, and you can see how your attention is used)
are guaranteed. Attention data is crucial to the future of the open
web, and Steve and Seth are making sure that no one entity or
oligopoly controls it.
Movers and Shakers:
Steve
Gillmor, Seth Goldstein, Dave Sifry and
the other Attention.xml folks.
3. Open Media
Proprietary media standardsFlash, Windows Media, and QuickTime, to
name a few helped liven up the web. But they are proprietary
standards that try to keep us locked in, and they weren't created
from scratch to handle today's online content. That's why, for many
of us, an Open Media standard has been a holy grail. Yahoo's new
Media RSS standard brings us one step closer to achieving open
media, as do Ogg Vorbis audio codecs, XSPF playlists, or MusicBrainz. And
several sites offer digital creators not only a place to store
their content, but also to sell it.
Media
RSS (being developed by Yahoo with help from the community)
extends RSS and combines it with "RSS enclosures" adds metadata to
any media itemto create a comprehensive solution for media
"narrowcasters." To gain acceptance for Media RSS, Yahoo knows it
has to work with the community. As an active member of this
community, I can tell you that we'll create Media RSS equivalents
for rdf (an alternative subscription format) and Atom (yet
another subscription format), so no one will be able
to complain that Yahoo is picking sides in format wars.
When Yahoo announced the purchase of Flickr, Yahoo founder Jerry
Yang insinuated that Yahoo is acquiring "open DNA" to turn Yahoo
into an open standards player. Yahoo is showing what
happens when you take a multi-billion dollar company and make
openness one of its core valuesso Google, beware, even if Google
does have more research fellows and Ph.D.s.
The open media landscape is far and wide, reaching from game
machine hacks and mobile phone downloads to PC-driven bookmarklets,
players, and editors, and it includes many other standardization
efforts. XSPF is
an open standard for playlists, and MusicBrainz is an alternative
to the proprietary (and originally effectively stolen) database
that Gracenote licenses.
Ourmedia.org
is a community front-end to Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive.
Brewster has promised free bandwidth and free storage forever to
any content creators who choose to share their content via the
Internet Archive. Ourmedia.org is providing an easy-to-use
interface and community to get content in and out of the Internet
Archive, giving ourmedia.org users the ability to share their media
anywhere they wish, without being locked into a particular service
or tool. Ourmedia plans to offer open APIs and an open media
registry that interconnects other open media repositories into a
DNS-like registry (just like the www domain system), so folks can
browse and discover open content across many open media services.
Systems like Brightcove and Odeo support the concept of an open registry, and hope
to work with digital creators to sell their work to fulfill the
financial aspect of the
"Long Tail."
More Movers and Shakers:
Creative Commons, the Open Media Network, Jay
Dedman, Ryanne Hodson, Michael
Verdi, Eli Chapman, Kenyatta Cheese,
Doug Kaye, Brad Horowitz, Lucas Gonze,
Robert Kaye, Christopher
Allen, Brewster Kahle, JD Lasica,
and indeed, Marc Canter, among others.
4. Microcontent Publishing
Unstructured content is cheap to create, but hard to search
through. Structured content is expensive to create, but easy to
search. Microformats resolve the dilemma with simple
structures that are cheap to use and easy to search.
The first kind of widely adopted microcontent is blogging. Every
post is an encapsulated idea, addressable via a URL called a
permalink. You can syndicate or subscribe to this microcontent
using RSS or an RSS equivalent, and news or blog aggregators can
then display these feeds in a convenient readable fashion. But a
blog post is just a block of unstructured text—not a bad thing, but
just a first step for microcontent. When it comes
tostructureddata, such as personal identity profiles,
product reviews, or calendar-type event data, RSS was not designed
to maintain the integrity of the structures.
Right now, blogging doesn't have the underlying structure necessary
for full-fledged microcontent publishing. But that will change.
Think of local information services (such as movie listings, event
guides, or restaurant reviews) that any college kid can access and
use in her weekend programming project to create new services and
tools.
Today's blogging tools will evolve into microcontent publishing
systems, and will help spread the notion of structured data across
the blogosphere. New ways to store, represent and produce
microcontent will create new standards, such as Structured
Blogging and Microformats. Microformats differ from RSS feeds in
that you can't subscribe to them. Instead, Microformats are
embedded into webpages and discovered by search engines like Google
or Technorati. Microformats are creating common definitions for
"What is a review or event? What are the specific fields in the
data structure?" They can also specify what we can do with all this
information.OPML
(Outline Processor Markup Language) is a hierarchical file
format for storing microcontent and structured data. It was
developed by Dave Winer of RSS and podcast fame.
Events are one popular type of microcontent. OpenEvents is
already working to create shared databases of standardized events,
which would get used by a new generation of event portals—such as
Eventful/EVDB, Upcoming.org, and WhizSpark. The idea of OpenEvents is that
event-oriented systems and services can work together to establish
shared events databases (and associated APIs) that any developer
could then use to create and offer their own new service or
application. OpenReviews is still in the conceptual stage,
but it would make it possible to provide open alternatives to
closed systems like Epinions, and establish a shared database of
local and global reviews. Its shared open servers would be filled
with all sorts of reviews for anyone to access.
Why is this important? Because I predict that in the future, 10
times more people will be writing reviews than maintaining their
own blog. The list of possible microcontent standards goes on:
OpenJobpostings, OpenRecipes, and even OpenLists. Microsoft
recently revealed that it has been working on an
important new kind of microcontent: Lists—so OpenLists will attempt
to establish standards for the kindof lists we all
use, such as lists of Links, lists of To Do Items, lists of People,
Wish Lists, etc.
Movers and Shakers:
Tantek
Çelik and Kevin Marks of Technorati, Danny Ayers, Eric Meyer, Matt Mullenweg, Rohit Khare,
Adam
Rifkin, Arnaud Leene, Seb Paquet,
Alf Eaton,
Phil
Pearson, Joe
Reger, Bob Wyman among others.
5. Open Social Networks
I'll never forget the first time I met Jonathan Abrams, the
founder of Friendster. He was arrogant and brash and he claimed he
"owned" all his users, and that he was going to
monetize them and make a fortune off them. This attitude robbed
Friendster of its momentum, letting MySpace, Facebook, and other
social networks take Friendster's place.
Jonathan's notion of social networks as a way to control users is
typical of the Web 1.0 business model and its attitude towards
users in general. Social networks have become one of the
battlegrounds between old and new ways of thinking. Open standards
for Social Networking will define those sides very clearly. Since
meeting Jonathan, I have been working towards finding and
establishing open standards for social networks. Instead of closed,
centralized social networks with 10 million people in them, the
goal is making it possible to have 10 million social networks that
each have 10 people in them.
FOAF (which stands for Friend Of A Friend, and describes people and
relationships in a way that computers can parse) is a schema to
represent not only your personal profile's meta-data, but your
social network as well. Thousands of researchers use the FOAF schema in
their "Semantic Web" projects to connect people in all sorts of new
ways. XFN is a
microformat standard for representing your social network, while
vCard (long
familiar to users of contact manager programs like Outlook) is a
microformat that contains your profile information. Microformats
are baked into any xHTML webpage, which means
thatanyblog, social network page, or any webpage in
general can "contain" your social network in itand be used
byanycompatible tool, service or application.
PeopleAggregator is an earlier project now being integrated into
open content
management framework Drupal. The PeopleAggregator APIs will make it possible to
establish relationships, send messages, create or join groups, and
post between different social networks. (Sneak preview: this
technology will be available in the upcoming GoingOn
Network.)
All of these open social networking standards mean that
inter-connected social networks will form a mesh that will parallel
the blogosphere. This vibrant, distributed, decentralized world
will be driven by open standards: personalized online experiences
are what the new open web will be all aboutand what could be more
personalized than people's networks?
Movers and Shakers:
Eric Sigler,
Joel De Gan, Chris Schmidt, Julian Bond, Paul Martino, Mary Hodder, Drummond
Reed, Dan
Brickley, Randy Farmer, and Kaliya
Hamlin, to name a few.
6. Tags
Nowadays, no self-respecting tool or service can ship without
tags. Tags are keywords or phrases attached to
photos, blog posts, URLs, or even video clips. These user- and
creator-generated tags are an open alternative to what used to be
the domain of librarians and information scientists: categorizing
information and content using taxonomies. Tags are instead creating
"folksonomies."
The recently proposed OpenTags concept would be an open,
community-owned version of the popular Technorati Tags
service. It would aggregate the usage of tags across a wide
range of services, sites, and content tools. In addition to
Technorati's current tag features, OpenTags would let groups of
people share their tags in "TagClouds." Open tagging is likely to include some of
the open identity features discussed above, to create a tag system
that is resilient to spam, and yet trustable across sites all over
the web.
OpenTags owes a debt to earlier versions of shared tagging systems,
which include Topic Exchange and something called the k-collectora knowledge management tag aggregatorfrom
Italian company eVectors.
Movers & Shakers:
Phil
Pearson, Matt
Mower , Paolo Valdemarin, and Mary Hodder and Drummond Reed again, among others.
7. Pinging
Websites used to be mostly static. Search engines that crawled (or "spidered") them every so often did a good
enough job to show reasonably current versions of your cousin's
homepage or even Timemagazine's weekly headlines. But
when blogging took off, it became hard for search engines to keep
up. (Google has only just managed to offer blog-search functionality, despite buying Blogger back in early 2003.)
To know what was new in the blogosphere, users couldn't depend on
services that spidered webpages once in a while. The solution: a
way for blogs themselves to automatically notify blog-tracking
sites that they'd been updated. Weblogs.com was the first blog "ping service":
it displayed the name of a blog whenever that blog was updated.
Pinging sites helped the blogosphere grow, and more tools, services, and
portals started using pinging in new and different ways. Dozens of
pinging services and sitesmost of which can't talk to each
othersprang up.
Matt Mullenweg (the creator of open source blogging software
WordPress) decided that a one-stop service for pinging was needed.
He created Ping-o-Maticwhich aggregates ping services and
simplifies the pinging process for bloggers and tool developers.
With Ping-o-Matic, any developer can alert all of the industry's
blogging tools and tracking sites at once. This new kind of open
standard, with shared infrastructure, is a critical to the
scalability of Web 2.0 services.
As Matt
said:
There are a number of services designed specifically
for tracking and connecting blogs. However it would be expensive
for all the services to crawl all the blogs in the world all the
time. By sending a small ping to each service you let them know
you've updated so they can come check you out. They get the
freshest data possible, you don't get a thousand robots spidering
your site all the time. Everybody wins.
Movers and Shakers:
Matt
Mullenweg, Jim Winstead, Dave
Winer
8. Routing
Bloggers used to have to manually enter the links and content
snippets of blog posts or news items they wanted to blog. Today,
some RSS aggregators can send a specified post directly into an
associated blogging tool: as bloggers browse through the feeds they
subscribe to, they can easily specify and send any post they wish
to "reblog" from their news aggregator or feed
reader into their blogging tool. (This is usually referred to as
"BlogThis.") As structured blogging comes into
its own (see the section on Microcontent Publishing), it will be
increasingly important to maintain the structural integrity of
these pieces of microcontent when reblogging them.
Promising standard RedirectThis will combine a "BlogThis"-like capability
while maintaining the integrity of the microcontent. RedirectThis
will let bloggers and content developers attach a simple "PostThis"
button to their posts. Clicking on that button will send that post
to the reader/blogger's favorite blogging tool. This favorite tool is specified at the
RedirectThis web service, where users register their blogging tool
of choice. RedirectThis also helps maintain the integrity and
structure of microcontentthen it's just up to the user to prefer a
blogging tool that also attains that lofty goal of microcontent
integrity.
OutputThis is another nascent web services standard, to let
bloggers specify what "destinations" they'd like to have as options
in their blogging tool. As new destinations are added to the
service, more checkboxes would get added to their blogging
toolallowing them to route their published microcontent to
additional destinations.
Movers and Shakers:
Michael Migurski,
Lucas
Gonze
9. Open Communications
Likely, you've experienced the joys of finding friends on AIM or
Yahoo Messenger, or the convenience of Skyping with someone
overseas. Not that you're about to throw away your mobile phone or
BlackBerry, but for many, also having access to Instant Messaging
(IM) and Voice over IP (VoIP) is crucial.
IM and VoIP are mainstream technologies that already enjoy the
benefits of open standards. Entire industries are bornright this
secondbased around these open standards. Jabber has been an
open IM technology for yearsin fact, as XMPP, it
was officially dubbed a standard by the IETF.
Although becoming an official IETF standard is usually the kiss of
death, Jabber looks like it'll be around for a while, as entire
generations of collaborative, work-group applications and services
have been built on top of its messaging protocol. For VoIP,
Skype is clearly the leading standard todaythough one
could argue just how "open" it is (and defenders of
the IETF's SIP standard often do). But it is free and
user-friendly, so there won't be much argument from
users about it being insufficiently open. Yet there
may be a cloud on Skype's horizon: web behemoth Google recently
released a beta of Google
Talk, an IM client committed to open standards. It currently
supports XMPP, and will support SIP for VoIP
calls.
Movers and Shakers:
Jeremie Miller, Henning
Schulzrinne, Jon Peterson, Jeff Pulver
10. Device Management and Control
To access online content, we're using more and more devices.
BlackBerrys, iPods, Treos, you name it. As the web evolves, more
and more different devices will have to communicate with each other
to give us the content we want when and where we want it. No-one
wants to be dependent on one vendor anymorelike, say, Sonyfor their laptop, phone, MP3 player,
PDA, and digital camera, so that it all works together. We need
fully interoperable devices, and the standards to make that work.
And to fully make use of how content is moving online content and
innovative web services, those standards need to be open.
MIDI
(musical instrument digital interface), one of the very first
open standards in music, connected disparate vendors' instruments,
post-production equipment, and recording devices. But MIDI is
limited, and MIDI II has been very slow to arrive. Now a new
standard for controlling musical devices has emerged: OSC (Open SoundControl). This protocol is optimized
for modern networking technology and inter-connects music, video
and controller devices with "other multimedia devices." OSC is used
by a wide range of developers, and is being taken up in the
mainstream MIDI marketplace.
Another open-standards-based device management technology is
ZigBee, for
building wireless intelligence and network monitoring into all
kinds of devices. ZigBee is supported by many networking, consumer
electronics, and mobile device companies.
· · · · · ·
The Change to Openness
The rise of open source software and its "architecture of participation" are completely
shaking up the old proprietary-web-services-and-standards approach.
Sun Microsystemswhose proprietary Java standard helped define the
Web 1.0is opening its Solaris OS and has even announced the
apparent paradox of an open-source Digital Rights Management system.
Today's incumbents will have to adapt to the new openness of the
Web 2.0. If they stick to their proprietary standards, code, and content, they'll
become the new walled gardensplaces users visit briefly to
retrieve data and content from enclosed data silos, but not where
users "live." The incumbents' revenue models will have to change.
Instead of "owning" their users, users will know they own
themselves, and will expect a return on their valuable identity and
attention. Instead of being locked into incompatible media formats,
users will expect easy access to digital content across many
platforms.
Yesterday's web giants and tomorrow's users will need to find a
mutually beneficial new balancebetween open and proprietary,
developer and user, hierarchical and horizontal, owned and shared,
and compatible and closed.
Marc Canter is an active evangelist and developer of open
standards. Early in his career, Marc founded MacroMind, which
became Macromedia. These days, he is CEO of Broadband Mechanics, a
founding member of the Identity Gang and of ourmedia.org. Broadband
Mechanics is currently developing the GoingOn Network (with the AlwaysOn Network), as
well as an open platform for social networking called the
PeopleAggregator.
A version of the above post appears in the Fall 2005 issue of
AlwaysOn's quarterly print blogozine, and ran as a four-part series on the AlwaysOn Network
website. |
(Via Marc's Voice.)
10/26/2005 19:28 GMT-0500 |
Modified: 06/22/2006 08:56
GMT-0500 |
Wired News: Pumping Indies on MTV
Wired News: Pumping Indies on MTV: "Search: Pumping Indies on
MTV Page 1 of 1 By Ryan Singel| Also
by this reporter 02:00 AM Oct. 21, 2005 PT Norbury and Finch are a
folk duo based on Vancouver Island. They aren't signed to a music
label, but fans of the Ozzy Osbourne reality show and HBO's Real
Sex have heard their music, thanks to an innovative music-licensing
company that has placed thousands of songs by little-known artists
on big-name television shows. Pump Audio is a Hudson Valley, New
York-based company that helps independent musicians and artists who
are on small labels, or no label, get paid for their art. The
company provides hard drives full of music to harried production
teams at networks such as MTV and the Food Network. See also Bands
Embrace Social Networking You, Too, Could Be in Advertising Bands
to Labels: Play With Us DAT's Entertainment, So Enjoy Today's Top 5
Stories Creating the Global Hot Spot Hear, Hear for Audio Erotica
Pumping Indies on MTV Cliff Notes From the Blog Wor"
(Via .)
10/22/2005 13:37 GMT-0500 |
Modified: 06/22/2006 08:56
GMT-0500 |
World Wide Web of Junk
After digesting Oblique Angle's post
titled:
World Wide Web of Junk, it was nice to be reassured that I am
not part of a shrinking minority of increasingly peturbed Web
users. The post excerptbelow is what compelled me to
contributesome of my thoughts about the current state of the
Web and a future "Semantic Web".
The value of the Internet as a repository of
useful information is very low. Carl Shapiro in
“Information Rules”
suggests that the amount of actually useful information on the
Internet would fit within roughly 15,000 books, which is about half
the size of an average mall bookstore. To put this in perspective:
there are over 5 billion unique, static & publicly accessible
web pages on the www. Apparently Only 6% of web sites have
educational content (Maureen Henninger, “Don’t
just surf the net: Effective research strategies”. UNSW Press).
Even of the educational content only a fraction is of significant
informational value.
Noise is taking over the Web at an
alarming rate (to be expected in a sense ), and even though
Tim Berners-Lee
(TBL) had the foresight to create the Web,many see nothing
butfutilityin hisvision for a "Semantic Web" (I
don't!). A recent exampleof such commentary comes from
Eric Nee's CIO article, titled: Web
Future is Not Semantic, Or Overly Orderly. I take issue with
this article because, like most (who have been bitten at least
once), I don't like mono culture. This article inadvertently
promotes "Google Mono Culture". I haveexcerpted the
more frustrating parts of this article below:
..As Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin looked at
the same problem—how to impart meaning to all the content on the
Web—and decided to take a different approach. The two developed
sophisticated software that relied on other clues to discover the
meaning of content, such as which Web sites the information was
linked to. And in 1998 they launched Google..
You mean noise ranking. Now, I don't think Larry and
Sergey set out to do this, but Google page ranks are ultimately
based on the concept of "Google Juice" (aka links). The value
quotient of this algorithm is accelerating at internet speed
(ironically, but naturally). Human beings are smarter than
computers, we just processdata (not information!)much
slower that's all. Thus, we can conjure up numerous ways to bubble
up the google link ranking algorithms in no time (as is the case
today).
..What most differentiates Google's
approach from Berners-Lee's is that Google doesn't require people
to change the way they post content..
The Semantic Web doesn't require anyone
to change how they post content either! It just provides a roadmap
for intelligent content managment and consumption through
innovative products.
..As Sergey Brin told Infoworld's
2002 CTO Forum, "I'd rather make progress by having computers
under-stand what humans write, than by forcing -humans to write in
ways that computers can understand." In fact, Google has not
participated at all in the W3C's formulation of Semantic Web
standards, says Eric Miller..
Semantic Content generated by next
generation content managers will make more progress, and they
certainly won't require humans to write any differently. If
anything, humans will find the process quite refreshing as and when
participation is required e.g. clickingbookmarklets
associated with tagging services such as'del.icio.us', 'de.lirio.us', or Unalog and others. But this is only the
beginning, if I can click on a bookmarklet to post this blog post
to a tagging service, then why wouldn't I be able to incorporate
the "tag service post" into the same process that saves my blog
post (the post is content that ends up in a content management system aka
blog server)?
Yet Google's impact on the Web is so
dramatic that it probably makes more sense to call the next
generation of the Web the "Google Web" rather than the "Semantic
Web."
Ah! so you think wereally want the
noisy "Google Web" as opposed to a federation of distributed
Information- and Knowledgbases ala the "Semantic Web"? I don't
think so somehow!
Today we are generally excited about
"tagging" but fail to see its correlation with the "Semantic Web",
somehow? I have said this before, and I will say it again, the
"Semantic Web" is going to be self-annotated by humanswith
theaid ofintelligent and unobtrusive annotation
technology solutions. These solutions willprovide context and
purposeby using ourour social essence as currency. The
annotationeffort will be subliminal, therewon't be a
"Semantic Web Day" parade or anything of the like.It will
appear before us all, in all its glory, without any
fanfare.Funnily enough, wemight not even call it "The
Semantic Web", who cares? But it will have the distinct attributes
of being very "Quiet" and highly "Valuable"; withno burden
on"how wewrite", but constructiveburden on "why
wewrite" as part of the content contributionprocess
(less Google/Yahoo/etc juicechasingfor more
knowledgeassembly and exchange).
We are social creatures at our core. The
Internet and Web have collectively reduced the connectivity hurdles
thatonce made social network oriented solutions implausible.
The eradication ofthese hurdles ultimately feeds the very
impulses that trigger the critical self-annotation that is the
basis of my fundamental belief in the realization of TBL's Semantic
Web vision.
05/20/2005 23:07 GMT-0500 |
Modified: 06/22/2006 08:56
GMT-0500 |
Social Construction of Reality
An interesting article
by Brad Cox.
(inventor of Objective-C) that's
provides great foundation for a understanding number of
issuesthatare relevant to social networking
systems.
05/13/2005 11:31 GMT-0500 |
Modified: 06/22/2006 08:56
GMT-0500 |
|
|