Category: W3C
April 8th, 2009
Ivan Herman discusses Semantic Web activity at the World Wide Web Consortium
Ivan Herman is Semantic Web Activity Lead at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and in this podcast he talks about a range of current activities across the Semantic Web community.
December 8th, 2008
Mark Greaves of Vulcan sees business opportunities in the Semantic Web
Vulcan shares many traits with its reclusive founder, Paul Allen, yet behind the scenes the company is responsible for philanthropic support to research and community-building activities, as well as investing commercially in the likes of Radar Networks (the company behind Twine) and Evri.
Last week, I had the opportunity to talk with Mark Greaves, Vulcan’s Director of Knowledge Systems Research, and the resulting podcast was released earlier today.
Drawing upon a background that includes the likes of Boeing and DARPA, Greaves is persuaded of the benefits to be found in applying semantic technologies to existing business problems and processes.
Greaves identifies four broad areas ripe for development;
- Search
- Enterprise Information
- Social Semantic Web Applications
- Web-scale Knowledge Publishing
It will be interesting to see the extent to which Vulcan - and others - invest in these areas next year.
August 12th, 2008
Putting Semantic Technology to work at BT
UK-based telecoms (and more) provider, BT, has been interested in the Semantic Web for a long time, as a brief conversation I recorded with the company’s Head of Next Generation Web Research back in January 2007 illustrates.
John Davies appears in silicon.com this week, as part of a short piece discussing the moves by Thomson Reuters, Yahoo!, Microsoft and others to move the Semantic Web from the lab to mainstream adoption.
John is reported as saying that;
“BT is developing semantic technology able to interrogate a range of databases through a single search query.
BT is already using this tech in its sales and billing departments and plans to roll it out to its business customers in the near future.”
Another example of people simply getting on with putting semantic technologies to work, behind the scenes, in making mundane but necessary business processes run that little bit better.
The podcast conversation with John was an early part of a series available here.
June 18th, 2008
Tim Berners-Lee talks cranberry sauce and Linked Data in New York City
Sir Tim Berners-Lee took to the stage in New York City last night, to deliver the final keynote of the day at JupiterMedia’s new semantic web event, Linked Data Planet.
The ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel was certainly busier than earlier in the day, as a smattering of Press and members of the New York Semantic Web Meetup joined delegates at the two day conference to hear Berners-Lee speak.
In many ways, his essential argument (unsurprisingly) was a reprise of themes explored in conversation with me earlier this year, expanded upon in Beijing in April and at the recent Rensselaer debate.
In a clarification of language, Berners-Lee stressed the importance distinction between ‘Linked Data’ and ‘Linked Open Data,’ noting that the terms can - incorrectly and confusingly - be used interchangeably.
Linked Data, he contested, is data made visible using open standards in a way that conforms to his earlier Principles document;
“Use URIs as names for things Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.”
In essence, he argues that data should be made available in such a way that individual items (a person in an HR system, a printer cartridge in a stock control system, etc) has a ‘name’ that has meaning, and that can be retrieved. If I am employee 123, then something like http://my-company.com/hr-system/employees/123 might pull up my records for anyone with permission to see them.
As Berners-Lee has remarked on more than one occasion recently, Linked Data is ‘the web done right.’ He said it again last night, and clearly believes passionately that we need to move beyond the current paradigm in which off-web databases are only grudgingly exposed to third parties via limited Web interfaces. The data in those databases could be part of the Web too - for those with permission to see it, of course - rather than remaining locked up inside a separate silo.
Linked Open Data goes a step further, inheriting all the attributes of Linked Data and adding requirements that the data be ‘open’ and therefore available for full and free use and reuse by third parties. Recent work (disclosure: commissioned and funded by my employer, Talis) on the Open Data Commons offers one licensing regime under which this requirement to be ‘open’ can be met.
We then turned to an image of the label from a jar of cranberry sauce. In an analogy that worked well with the audience, Berners-Lee illustrated the way in which different elements of the label (brand, product name, dietary information, allergy warnings, printers’ mark, etc) applied to various geographies in different ways, had different legislative implications, and required very different regulatory processes to check assertions and reach consensus on the metrics involved. The ‘brand’ may be global, for example, and entirely within the purview of the brand owner. The product name may vary from country to country, but is essentially controlled by the brand owner too… albeit with the inevitable input from consumer focus groups. Whilst the ‘facts’ of the dietary information may be universal, local regulations from bodies such as the US Food and Drug Administration will require different attributes of those facts to be expressed, and may require the same information to be expressed in quite different ways depending upon local practice. Finally the (usually hidden) printing information at the edge of the label may well be globally applicable, but defined by a very different set of processes governed by equipment manufacturers, the international standards bodies, etc.
That single label is a container for several different pieces of information, all governed by various processes and regulations that operate independently of one another. There is no need for the producer of this cranberry sauce to get regulators, printers, focus groups, marketing professionals, ink makers, and healthcare workers in a room to agree on the whole label. Equally, there is no need to involve any of the other parties when regulations, policy, or the brand manager require changes to one piece of the whole.
Berners-Lee argued that the RDF specification lying behind the Semantic Web works in a very similar way, enabling data from different systems to be drawn together and expressed within the wrapper of a single RDF document in a way very different to the top-down and robustly specified syntaxes used elsewhere in the IT world. The complexity and inflexibility of some enterprise XML schemas, he argued, was like a world in which every contributor to that cranberry sauce label would have to agree to the content and form of every other element on the label. The flexibility of RDF cetainly seems compelling, when painted in that light!
Moving on, Berners-Lee challenged the notion that ‘the market for data’ is most important anymore. He argued that there is far more opportunity in ‘markets enabled by data;’ markets that almost inevitably require the underlying raw data itself to be easily available and commoditised. This argument is not new, and it is one that at least some traditional data holders are beginning to grasp. Thomson Reuters, for example, is making huge strides forward with their Open Calais initiative, which has been discussed here before. Barak Pridor from Thomson Reuters also spoke at the conference, and I’ll cover his presentation shortly. The argument may not be new, but there’s a long way to go in persuading everyone involved in the data business. Tim’s growing interest in this aspect of the story will hopefully be a powerful weapon moving forward.
“When there’s lots of linkable data out there, there will be huge competitive advantage in a good user interface.”
By adopting the same underlying specifications (RDF etc) and accepting Tim’s exhortations to name things with URI’s, data owners stand to unlock a lot of the value that is currently tied up in their expensive back-end silos. How far, though, are our media companies, hardware manufacturers, and financial institutions prepared to go? Berners-Lee presents a bold yet achievable vision. Was New York listening, and how will it respond? How will such a response differ from the one we might expect in the more risk-prone Valley, or the Semantic Web research powerhouses of Europe?
April 29th, 2008
Sir Tim Berners-Lee addresses WWW2008 in Beijing
Speaking from the stage in China’s Great Hall of the People last Thursday evening, World Wide Web inventor and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium Sir Tim Berners-Lee shared some of his hopes for the Web with his audience of WWW2008 delegates, impeccably polite and ever-helpful conference volunteers and a collection of local dignitaries. Read the rest of this entry »
April 22nd, 2008
Linked Data on the Web, WWW2008
The main programme of this year’s World Wide Web Conference gets underway here in Beijing today (Wednesday), but ahead of that yesterday was devoted to workshops.
With my colleague Tom Heath one of the co-chairs, a paper (pdf) from colleagues Rob Styles, Nadeem Shabir and (the absent) Danny Ayers, and a paper (pdf) from myself, Rob and Tom, my choice of workshop was an easy one to make; Linked Data on the Web.
Tom outlined some of his hopes for the day in a recent article, and the workshop website explains;
“The Web is increasingly understood as a global information space consisting not just of linked documents, but also of Linked Data. More than just a vision, the Web of Data has been brought into being by the maturing of the Semantic Web technology stack, and by the publication of large datasets according to the principles of Linked Data. During 2007, the size of the Web of Data has grown to several billion RDF triples which are served by a network of interlinked data sources and which cover domains such as geographic information, people, companies, online communities, films, music, books and scientific publications. In addition to publishing and interlinking datasets, there is also ongoing work on Linked Data browsers, Linked Data crawlers, Web of Data search engines and other applications that consume Linked Data from the Web.”
Opening the workshop, Sir Tim Berners-Lee emphatically declared,
“Linked Data is the Semantic Web done as it should be. It is the Web done as it should be.”
Presentations throughout the day went a long way toward validating Berners-Lee’s opening assertion. Many - on their own - only described a small part of the problem space, and few - on their own - would have proved compelling to those not on the ‘inside’ of this group. Brought together, though, the collection of resources, ideas, and demonstrations clearly illustrated the potential of a web on which distributed data are drawn together programmatically in order to enrich the user experience.
With the notable exception of Renault’s François-Paul Servant, the emphasis remained very much one of experimentation and research. As we move to the next phase, a number of assumptions need to change, and ‘inconvenient’ practicalities such as licensing, permissions, sustainability, persistence, and quality become increasingly important. The ad hoc mashup that, perhaps, doesn’t fully respect the letter of a third party’s terms and conditions may be acceptable for a demonstrator or proof of concept; the proposition becomes radically different when a service is being delivered to, by, or from an enterprise.
Fundamentally, as Berners-Lee has seen, the work of the Linked Data projects points to a very different way of thinking about the role that data plays in enabling the next phase of the Web. Many of today’s Web applications actually act in very similar ways to traditional offline applications; a single application uses a single user interface to provide access to information from a single store of data. That store of data may now be remote to the user, but the value of linkages is certainly not leveraged. The Linked Data projects demonstrate something else; any number of applications, exposed via any number of user interfaces (and machine readable apis), drawing upon data stored across the Web in any number of stores.
Working through the implications may take a while, but we saw some good starts yesterday, and repeated calls from OpenLink’s Kingsley Idehen to ‘make it real.’
Update: My colleagues Rob Styles and Nadeem Shabir provide their perspectives on the workshop. Other attendees sharing their perspectives include Alexandre Passant.
March 28th, 2008
Why kill Google?
Technology journalists from the mainstream media appear obsessed with locating some magic bullet with which to topple Google from its dominant position in today’s Web, and use of violent language seems part and parcel of this obsession. Have Larry and Sergey done something to upset them? Did they all have Alta Vista stock? Have they been playing too much Halo? Or can they just not handle the fact that a company is doing pretty well in the stock market whilst actually managing to deliver a valuable user experience?
Whatever the reason, ‘Google Killers’ crop up with depressing regularity, even if (allegedly) you need to put words in the mouths of your commentators to find one.
I spoke with Powerset CTO Barney Pell last night, and one of the topics we explored was his company’s billing last year as a ‘Google Killer.’ More on that conversation in a later post, because for now I want to turn to a related item from overnight; Tim Berners-Lee’s latest post to his low-volume blog.
Tim talks about the attention that one of his recent flurry of press interviews has attracted. In this case, he was talking to British broadsheet, The Times, and notes of the article;
“the Times online mis-states that I think ‘Google could be superseded’. Sigh. In an otherwise useful discussion largely about what the Semantic Web is and how it will affect people, a misunderstanding which ended up being the title of the blog.”
He continues,
“The Semantic Web will not supersede the current Web. They will coexist. The techniques for searching and surfing the different aspects will be different but will connect. Text search engines [like Google] don’t have to go out of fashion.”
(my emphasis)
Noting the speed with which news stories such as that from The Times spread into the blogosphere, Tim comments on the difficulty that he is experiencing in getting the paper to correct its misrepresentation of his words and uses this as a trail into a wider consideration of data re-use online.
This (the ability to combine, recombine, use, reuse, link, link, and link again), he would appear to suggest, is the Semantic Web’s (forgive my slip into the language of violence) ‘Killer App.’
“The benefit of the Semantic Web is that data may be re-used in ways unexpected by the original publisher. That is the value added. So when a Semantic Web start-up either feeds data to others who reuse it in interesting ways, or itself uses data produced by others, then we start to see the value of each bit increased through the network effect.”
Bravo. I couldn’t agree more.
I must also admit, though, to being surprised at the extent to which too many ‘Semantic Web’ companies appear not to get this. Too many of those I speak with are proudly, happily, and expensively building yet another data silo. Semantics may run through their applications, and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications may even get a mention. But the essential primacy of linkable reuse outside the carefully managed boundaries of their application is greeted - at best - with carefully spun hedgeing and - at worst - with outright horror. “Why would some poor misguided user want to do anything outside the Nirvana that my application gives them? Are you mad?”
Tim gives due credit to the great work going on in the Linked Open Data project, and trails the associated workshop (at which I’ll be speaking, along with several of my Talis colleagues) at the Web Conference in Beijing next month.
I, for one, want to see more of the commercial Semantic Web startups embracing a lot more of those ideas. Linked Open Data as a university research project is one thing. Linked Open Data at the heart of a business model is something else entirely, and it appears to be something that either the investors or the startups are not yet taking seriously enough. This is the promise of the Semantic Web; Linking. If the Semantic Web only results in yet another generation of silos then what’s the point? It’s probably easier to build a silo using mySQL and some PHP. The investment in enhancing the linkability, the citeability, of a data resource can only be realised once third parties can link, and can cite.
Rant over, for now. But I really do want to hear from those who get it. And, like Tim;
“So in scanning new Semantic Web news, I’ll be looking out for re-use of data. The momentum around Linked Open Data is great and exciting — let us also make sure we make good use of the data.”
March 20th, 2008
Jim Hendler shares AI's lessons for the Semantic Web
Professor James A. Hendler goes by the daunting title of ‘Tetherless World Senior Constellation Professor’ at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York. Behind the title stands a man who has been closely involved with Artificial Intelligence (AI) research for many years, and someone recognised as amongst the progenitors of the Semantic Web ideal. Hendler is also Associate Director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), an activity that is being pushed hard by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (a Director) and others.
I spoke to Jim recently, and in a wide-ranging conversation we touched upon early hype around the promise of Artificial Intelligence, conflicting aspirations for the Semantic Web Read the rest of this entry »
March 14th, 2008
Commercial uses of the Semantic Web at WWW2008 ?
This year’s World Wide Web conference (WWW2008) is rapidly approaching, and all over the planet web researchers are grappling with the Chinese visa application process ahead of their trip to Beijing.
In contrast to a corporate event like Semantic Technology, the World Wide Web conferences tend to be geared more toward the research community, and .edu, .ac.uk and similar addresses definitely outweigh the .com’s on delegate business cards.
Corporate delegates certainly do attend, though, and as Semantic Web applications become increasingly relevant to the enterprise I would expect reasonable commercial representation in the Semantic Web tracks at the conference.
Talking this over with Danny Ayers and the Chair of the conference Developer Track, Google’s Jeffrey Korn, we wondered if there might be scope for a panel specifically looking at commercial uses of Semantic Web ideas and technology. I would certainly be interested in seeing that fusion of business thinking and cutting edge academic research.
So if you work in a .com that’s doing interesting stuff with the Semantic Web, plan to be in Beijing, and would be interested in sitting on a panel like that, please do get in touch. I’ll pass the names to Jeff, and he can then see if the idea is viable.
February 26th, 2008
Sir Tim Berners-Lee: Semantic Web is open for business
Earlier this month I had the great pleasure to spend time talking with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in Cambridge, MA.
Our wide-ranging dig into the past, present and future of the Semantic Web was recorded for one of the regular Talking with Talis podcasts, and now appears here as the first of a new podcast series for ZDNet; Talking Semantics.
In this post, I’d like to draw out some aspects of the conversation that I found most interesting. Have a listen for yourself, draw your own conclusions, and please do share them in TalkBack. Read the rest of this entry »
Paul Miller provides consultancy and analysis services at the interface between the worlds of Cloud Computing and the Semantic Web. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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