January 24th, 2008
Getting enveloped by the potential of Cloud computing
The orgy of present unwrapping at the end of last year feels a surprisingly long time ago, so it is with some enthusiasm that I await the arrival of my latest bundle from Amazon. Nestled alongside the new offerings from Seth Godin and Garr Reynolds, I look forward to lifting Nick Carr’s latest much-trailed tome which the book’s own website describes thus;
“The shift [to utility computing] is already remaking the computer industry, bringing new competitors like Google and Salesforce.com to the fore and threatening stalwarts like Microsoft and Dell. But the effects will reach much further. Cheap, utility-supplied computing will ultimately change society as profoundly as cheap electricity did. We can already see the early effects — in the shift of control over media from institutions to individuals, in debates over the value of privacy, in the export of the jobs of knowledge workers, even in the growing concentration of wealth. As information utilities expand, the changes will only broaden, and their pace will only accelerate.”
I obviously haven’t read the book yet, but I understand that Carr sees this trend as a worrying one. Stephen Baker’s review in BusinessWeek notes, for example, that;
“Carr warns this trend could herald a new, darker phase for the Internet—one where these mega-networks could eventually operate as a fearsome entity that will dominate our lives. He dubs it ‘the World Wide Computer’.”
…
“[Carr] describes a world in which a handful of lucky and brilliant entrepreneurs uses the World Wide Computer to tap humanity’s smarts and creativity for free, à la YouTube and Wikipedia, while putting legions of information professionals out of work. If that’s not dreary enough, he predicts that companies and governments will be able to harvest data from these networked computers to track our behavior and, ultimately, to control us.”
People probably said something similar as Ferranti, Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse et al championed the distribution of electricity from increasingly large and remote electricity generating facilities. Is the premise bad, or is it ‘merely’ a (potentially) painful transition that we face?
Writing in December’s issue of the SemanticReport, I take a slightly different look at a related set of issues. In my article, ‘Moving the Internet Inside with Semantic Technologies‘, I contend that;
“The vast majority of today’s enterprise applications owe their genesis to a period very different from today. Even the most apparently innovative share perhaps unnecessary heritage with their ancestors, preventing them from fully exploiting the potential of an ever-more connected world.
The increased ubiquity of high speed access to the Internet has changed the lives of millions. At the same time, plummeting costs for storage, computing and bandwidth have formed key aspects of the environmental shift that has enabled Web-based companies to entice users with significant free offerings, and to subsequently monetise these in a variety of ways from the ever-popular ‘pro’ account to the universal fall-back of advertising. The Web has become our water cooler, our photo album, our book shop, our encyclopaedia, our travel agent, our road atlas, and also fulfils a host of functions without commonplace offline forms.
Inside the enterprise, the Internet remains at a remove from the applications within which most employees spend their time. Valid concerns around security are certainly a factor here, as are the long lead times required to develop and implement new systems. More serious, though, is an apparent lack of vision. Rather than fundamentally re-engineering with what Tim O’Reilly refers to as ‘the Internet Inside,’ new applications continue to repeat the methods and mindset of the past. The capabilities of the network Cloud beyond the corporate firewall remain woefully underused, their potential unrealised.”
We have, of course, seen significant use of the network to connect the far-flung offices of an organisation, and to enable connectivity amongst collaborators. Banks move data amongst themselves all the time, and some of that traverses the Internet. Libraries around the world hurl Z39.50 queries and responses at one another all the time, and all sorts of other organisations leverage the network as a means to transfer information from one place to another. My point is not that businesses don’t use the web. Rather, it’s that they fail to embrace its potential. To consider the Internet as a means of point to point transmission is, surely, to miss the opportunity presented by a complex and multi-directional network of variously connected nodes. The Web isn’t (just) a FedEx for bits and bytes. It also shouldn’t be considered as merely a means of physically separating the components of our traditional monolithic applications, applications that whatever their geographic diffusion remain logically massive and discrete.
Technologies such as those being espoused for the Semantic Web enable us to take further steps, turning traditional application architectures on their heads and embracing the potential offered by a new generation of services that are conceived and constructed with the network at their heart.
By taking a fundamentally Web-based approach to the development of applications, we shift from bolting Web capabilities onto the silo toward a mode in which data and functionality are native to the Web: a mode in which the design decisions are more about modelling business requirements for limiting the ways in which data flows from one point to another rather than trying to anticipate the places in which it might be needed in order to design those pathways into software from the outset.
Data needn’t reside within a single application, and as the trend toward ‘widgets‘ and ‘dashboards‘ has begun to illustrate, interaction with the application itself is no longer restricted to navigation within its own user interface.
How do we change the mindset of today’s application developers, in order that they stop building ‘old’ applications in the new world?
In beginning to think about this post, my original premise was around ‘embracing the cloud [computing]’. However, UK technology journalist Bill Thompson was quick to point out that
“if you embrace a cloud you fall to earth… maybe you need to be enveloped by it…”
Indeed.
January 24th, 2008
Demonstrating the value of SPARQL to the Semantic Web
I wrote a piece on Nodalities last week, to draw readers’ attention to the news that SPARQL had reached the dizzy heights of ‘Recommendation’; the highest accolade that those guardians of the web’s evolution, W3C, can award to a technology, and the closest that the group comes to calling anything ’standard’.
SPARQL is definitely extremely important. Indeed, Tim Berners-Lee went so far as to suggest that;
“Trying to use the Semantic Web without SPARQL is like trying to use a relational database without SQL.”
However, it’s one of those pieces of the puzzle that just gets on and does its job, behind the scenes, often unnoticed and unremarked. That is, of course, exactly as it should be. Technology (unless it’s an iPhone) isn’t there to be drooled over. It isn’t there to rub your nose in its cleverness. It should just ensure, quietly, that your task is completed with less fuss, less intervention, and less hassle than before. If you’re lucky, it might let you do something you couldn’t do before.
Reduced to its simplest, the SPARQL Recommendations offer a simple and standard means of querying any store of RDF, regardless of the software used to run the store. The software has to support SPARQL, of course, and the Talis Platform is amongst those that do.
I reckon about 50% of Nodalities‘ readership (where this item was originally posted) knows all this, and lobs SPARQL queries about with gay abandon. That picture is probably quite different here on Web 2.0 Explorer, making the examples that follow even more important. Seeing is often an important step toward believing, and luckily I know just the man to help.
My colleague, Danny Ayers, has put together a simple demonstration to illustrate how SPARQL queries can be formed and submitted to one of several Talis Platform stores. As the Semantic Web grows, and reaches increasingly beyond the laboratory and the Intranet to embrace the open Web, the ability to consistently and reliably query disparate pools of data via SPARQL will become ever more important. Any resource becomes - potentially - both directly addressable and consistently queryable. A very different picture from that of today’s web… where often all you can search for across the Web at large is the user interface of some proprietary database or other. You then need to visit that database, understand its interface, and then ask the question again; this time constrained to the pool of possible answers within that one source.
Take a look at Danny’s examples (including one for the Twitter store he built for his article in this month’s Talis Platform News) and you begin to understand some of what’s possible. Now stretch a bit, and imagine this query capability transposed behind the shiny, curvy-cornered UI of some Web 2.0 application. Suddenly, this application breaks free of the limitations of its own ‘database’, and is able to reach out across the Web at large to interact with conformant and permissive agglomerations of data, wherever they may be.
See? Told you SPARQL was important.
Item slightly modified version of a post to the Nodalities blog.
Technorati Tags: Danny Ayers, Semantic Web, SPARQL, Talis, Talis Platform, W3C, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, web services
December 17th, 2007
Amazon’s latest web service? A database
Amazon Web Services Evangelist Jeff Barr has been at it again, using Twitter to announce the release of his employer’s latest offering.
Amazon has come a long way since its days as a big book shop, and is increasingly making a name for itself as an exemplar of commodity computation.
First we had the Simple Storage Service, S3. Little more than a big disk in the Cloud, it offered an affordable means by which anyone could make large amounts of data available for download by large numbers of people. Second Life client downloads come from S3, as do Talis podcasts. Several of my colleagues use S3 for backing up their laptops (I use Mozy myself, but that’s another story).
Then we got the Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2. This commoditised availability of virtual computers, making it relatively straightforward for those experiencing rapid growth - or needing short-term access to additional computing power for some other reason - to call upon additional computers as required, configure them as needed, use them for as long as necessary, and then throw them back into the pool when done.
Unsurprisingly, given Amazon’s e-Commerce heritage, a payment service came next. This essentially opened Amazon’s own e-Commerce capabilities to third party developers, and allowed them to build it into their own applications. Although we knew that this would come, I should admit here that the pundits at Talis (including myself) were sure that Amazon’s third web service would be the one they actually only announced today. Given our interest in data and their interest in e-Commerce, it’s perhaps not surprising that we prioritised them differently.
Next in the path, a Service Level Agreement. Essential, if Amazon are to move beyond the early adopters and actually see mass market numbers of mainstream enterprises rely upon their web services.
Which brings us to today, and the unveiling of Amazon SimpleDB. It had to come, and now it has, offering;
“a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud.”
It’s great to see, and in some ways the conceptual use of Cloud-based ‘content’ and ‘metadata’ is similar to our own ideas around the Talis Platform… although with very different emphasis and realisation.
And yes, I know I missed SQS and Mechanical Turk, and various other Amazon web services from my story…
Story originally posted on the Nodalities blog
Technorati Tags: Amazon Web Services, AWS, EC2, Jeff Barr, web services, S3, SimpleDB, Talis, Talis Platform
December 4th, 2007
Hulu, News Corp, and the Web (2.0?)
I know this is behind the game, and that the bleeding edge of blog
reviews has moved well beyond online streaming service Hulu (even
though it’s not yet out to the public). But I received my beta invite
last week and have had all this time to play around with it.
My initial thoughts: none.
No, not one initial thought. Hulu doesn’t work in the UK. They don’t
tell you: “Hey, if you live in the UK, you will be able to access and
begin your Hulu experience, but when you choose a show to stream,
you’ll be disappointed. Have a nice day.” You have to jump through all
the Beta hoops to get there first.
Now, I know I should have known better, being a generally web-savvy
chap. But after a few pre-reviews of the Hulu service, I decided not to
read any more blogs about it until after I’d tried it out myself. I
knew not to expect too much, after reading the last review over at Between the Lines , but I wanted my own experience.
Since then, I’ve found dozens of blogs about how bad it is that Hulu doesn’t work in Europe
. Aside from whingeing about the lack of support, I can’t really think
of anything more to write about Hulu (apart from its ridiculous,
trying-too-hard-for-the-Web-2.0-market name).
But, doesn’t this kind of go against point of the web? The idea that
we can make connections, share content, stream and connect?
The principle of the internet is broken by this experiment, and I
don’t think a platform intended to be a YouTube killer should ever have
been trialled in a geographically-limited network. Sure, I understand
private Betas, but why limit this to the States? I don’t think News Corp really gets the Web 2.0 thing. In fact, I wonder if they really get the internet?
It reminds me of LaunchCast (now Yahoo Music). When I first launched
the player, all the content was free, and there was absolutely loads of
it. I was thrilled! Over months, however, content became harder to find
due to advertisement interruptions and restrictions on skipping tracks. Suddenly, Launch re-directed to Yahoo, and I could no longer
skip any content without upgrading to a premium service which hadn’t
existed before. Then, when I moved to Britain, all the content was
unavailable apart from a limited selection which I can only presume was
intended for a British audience. (Don’t think my mates here would
have agreed in a focus group!)
I haven’t used a yahoo service since. No, seriously, I haven’t used
Yahoo. As soon as Konfabulator was purchased by Yahoo, I uninstalled
it. I was all set to set up a Flickr account, when I found out it was
Yahoo. (I might go back on that one, once I get a decent digital
camera.)
This wasn’t really a boycott so much as a pre-emptive decision. I
know that as soon as Yahoo gets a hold of a service, its
user-friendliness will dissolve into advertisements and ‘premium
services’ (a contradiction in terms!) This is what Hulu reminds me of.
An attempt at grabbing a market instead of a well-thought-out startup
trying to sell a genuinely good service and make a profit on its
quality.
What is Web 2.0? Hulu doesn’t know, and it makes me think that News
Corp hasn’t really got its head round it at all. I shudder to think what’s going to happen with LinkedIn.
-Zach (http://www.zachbeauvais.com)
November 26th, 2007
Who is afraid of the GGG?
Dan Farber was one of the first to cover the Giant Global Graph, here on ZDNet. A few days on, though, there’s value in taking a look at how these ideas are being discussed across the blogosphere.
The GGG, or Giant Global Graph. It sounds like something with which you might terrify a child at bed time, but this is no Gruffalo, no Jabberwock, no Smaug. Rather it’s father-of-the-web Tim Berners-Lee’s label for his latest attempt to express the power of the Semantic Web’s core technologies in ways that will resonate beyond the established SemWeb literati. In the post he writes;
“So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That’s just what the graph does for us. We have the technology — it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL. Not magic bullets, but the tools which allow us to break free of the document layer. If a social network site uses a common format for expressing that I know Dan Brickley, then any other site or program (when access is allowed) can use that information to give me a better service. Un-manacled to specific documents”
As we might expect when someone like Berners-Lee posts, his thoughts sparked the usual flurry of interest, picked up by The Guardian, Read/Write Web, ZD Net, Nova Spivack, GigaOM, Nick Carr, and a host of other bloggers. The compulsory Wikipedia stub is already in place, and anticipating (at the time of writing) that
“it may become a common expression.”
So what is this Giant Global Graph, how’s it related to the Semantic Web, and what does it all mean?
November 25th, 2007
Giant Global Graph: from the publisher-oriented web to the viewer-oriented web
Sir Tim Berners-Lee coined a new term again. This time it is called the Giant Global Graph. GGG is a compound concept that can be interpreted in various ways. One of the interpretations, however, immediately grasps me: in contrast to that the WWW abstraction organizes Internet information from the publisher-oriented aspect, the GGG abstraction organizes Internet information from the viewer-oriented aspect. The web evolution demands a new abstraction layer of Internet.
Two Views of Internet Information Organization
We can view the Internet information organization from two opposite aspects: one is from the web publisher’s aspect and the other is from the web viewer’s aspect. Respectively I call them the publisher-oriented view and the viewer-oriented view.
According to Sir Tim, the WWW abstraction is trying to address that “it isn’t the computers, but the documents which are interesting.” Publishers upload their organized information (in documents) onto the Web. Therefore, the traditional WWW abstraction of Internet information is based on publishers’ point of view. The information presented at the Web layer (specified by TBL) is publisher-oriented.
This publisher-oriented web, however, does not facilitate web information manipulation. The reason is simple: when manipulating web information, web users are playing the role of web viewer instead of the role of web publisher. Due to the view conflict, it is difficult to perform search on the basis of the viewer’ view over information that is stored by the publisher’s view. To solve this problem, a fundamental request is to organize web information onto a new abstraction layer that is presented on the basis of the web viewer’s view. At this new abstraction layer, the Web becomes the viewer-oriented web. Sir Tim named this new layer to be Giant Global Graph.
The fundamental units at WWW (the Web layer) are web pages (documents). The fundamental units at GGG (the Graph layer) are social graphs. When we compare a web page to a social graph, a web page contains a set of information organized by the publisher while a social graph contains a set of information organized by the viewer. This difference represents the most fundamental distinction between the WWW and the GGG. Since both a web page at WWW and a social graph at GGG play the same role in their respective abstraction layer, we may assign a general name for both of them. In fact, I have already proposed a name for such a role in my web evolution theory. The name is web space.
I have predicted that the web evolution is ultimately shown as the evolution of web spaces. On Web 1.0, web space is shown as homepage, a typical form of web pages. So Web 1.0 was a typical publisher-oriented web.
On Web 2.0, web spaces become individual accounts. Individual accounts contains information that is organized by both the publisher’s view and the viewer’s view. From one side, every account belongs to a particular web site. Therefore, the information organization inside an account is dominated by the website publisher’s view. For example, I have a YouTube account in which I cannot associate a blog post at Blogger to a saved favorite song. Why? It is because the owners of YouTube has decided for me that such an association is not in their view, and thus it should not in my view either. On the other hand, however, a user account does provide web viewers limited freedom to organized information by their own views. For example, I really can organize different songs on YouTube by my own viewpoints though the association between a song and a blog post is prohibited. This analysis tells us that Web-2.0 personal accounts are transitional products between the publisher-oriented web and the viewer-oriented web. Since we are not able to directly upgrade the Web to its viewer-oriented aspect, the emergence of this type of transitional products is both necessary and certain. Web 2.0 is in a transition from the publisher-oriented web to the viewer-oriented web.
Following this path, on the next generation web (or we may call it the Web 3.0) web space will be shown as a typical viewer-oriented information-organization unit. Or by using Sir Tim’s word, a web space at Web 3.0 will be a social graph. In each social graph, web users re-organize their information of interest based on their own view in contrast to the view of the original information publishers. Web-3.0 spaces will be more likely the viewer-side home-spaces in contract to the publisher-side home-pages on Web 1.0. By connecting all these Web-3.0 spaces (or social graphs) together we get the Giant Global Graph.
Summary
From the viewpoint of web evolution, the transition from the publisher-oriented web to the viewer-oriented web is inevitable. The proposal of Giant Global Graph from Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the newest evidence to this claim. Besides Sir Tim, this transition is also shown in the newest industry achievements. A typical example is the announcement of Twine. If we associate Twine to the proposal of GGG, we can see that what Twine does is exactly to re-organize web information from the publisher-oriented view to the viewer-oriented view. This is why Twine is so significant to most of the other Web-2.0 products. Twine is very close to be a real Web 3.0 product, though the current beta version is still lack of something essential.
This post is a compact version of a longer analysis of Giant Global Graph at Thinking Space.
November 21st, 2007
How smart can a link be?
After my trial implementation of AdaptiveBlue’s Smartlink technology on my blog, I was contacted by Director of Business Development, Fraser Kelton, who agreed to a Questions and Answers session about Adaptive Blue’s new technology. For a quick introduction, I have been trying out AdaptiveBlue’s Blue Organiser for a few weeks and found their semantic features helpful and intuitive for finding and retreiving changing information, and decided to try out the Smartlink code to offer this to readers of my blog:
- What makes a link Smart? Traditional links are not smart, they’re simple pointers to pages. When we write about a book and link to the book’s page on Amazon we mean to link to the thing but the link points to the page.
A link is smart when it’s capable of automatically identifying and understanding what the thing is on the page. Once the link is identified to mean a thing a lot of valuable information can be automatically presented to the user that’s contextually correct for the thing.
What I mean by this is that once a link is semantically understood to be about a specific book the user can be presented with options around that particular book - read the New York Times Book Review for the book, find similar books, save the book to social networks, etc. When the link is identified to be about a music album the actions and information presented are different and contextually correct.
- How about the ‘link’ in Smartlinks… where does it link to? With SmartLinks the user links like they normally would to a page on one of a dozen of sites - a book on Amazon, an artist on Last.fm, a stock on Google Finance, and a SmartLink is automatically inserted. The SmartLink is automatically inserted and when the icon is clicked a SmartLink pane launches that includes relevant content from across the web that’s populated using semantic understanding of the original link.
- How is this information kept up-to-date? Everything is automated so the information is always up-to-date. For example, when a user links to a stock page on Google Finance the SmartLink understands that the link is about a stock and will instantly pull up-to-date information about the specific stock into the SmartLink pane when it’s launched. When users link to new releases on Amazon, or one of our other supported sites, a SmartLink is automatically created for the book with relevant and correct information.
- Can I use Smartlinks on my own site or blog, and what would be the benefit from a content host’s perspective? Yes, SmartLinks install with 1-click for Blogger and Typepad, there’s a Wordpress plug-in and a single line of java script for all other blog platforms and sites. SmartLinks will then instantly appear on all links to supported sites - both for new posts and all archived posts.
There are a lot of benefits for enabling SmartLinks on your site. They automatically enable you to provide a tonne of additional and contextually correct information in your posts. Your readers will have the instant ability to discover and explore what you’ve blogged about without leaving your site and without having to search or filter for more information - SmartLinks do all of this automatically and present a nice package of pure results. Additionally, a blogger can connect their Amazon Affiliate ID to SmartLinks so that all Amazon links within the SmartLink are monetized - this occurs for new posts as well as all old posts, enabling bloggers to monetize their archives.
- Can smartlinks be used alongside RSS or in conjunction with subscription technology? (e.g. for keeping up to date with past current Smartlink, like following a stock or tracking the popularity of a favourite song)
Right now SmartLinks do not work with RSS.- Where would I find Smartlinks at the moment? (i.e. Who is using this technology?) SmartLinks are enabled on a large number of blogs. You can see some great examples at:
- http://madstocks.blogspot.com/ - wonderful stock blog that makes great use of SmartLinks for stocks
- http://steffanantonas.com/ - a great blog that has SmartLinks enabled as well as a number of SmartLink Widgets
- http://gothamgal.blogs.com/ - has a nice mix of book and music SmartLinks (check out the Typepad list in the right-hand sidebar - SmartLinks were automatically added providing additional benefit to something that previously existed)
- What are ‘Semantics’ on the web, and how do smartlinks feature in the ’semantic web’? Semantics is defined as “the meaning, or an interpretation of the meaning, of a word, sign, sentence, etc.” To understand the meaning of a word is to semantically understand it. Semantic Web is an academic term about using standardized data formats and a language for recording the relationship between data so that computers can analyze and understand meaning and context of all data on the web.
At AdaptiveBlue we’re taking a top-down approach to semantic understanding. Our products are focused on bringing additional value to consumers in just a few basic verticals - books, music, stocks, etc. It’s a noun-verb equation. We leverage vertical semantic knowledge and existing information on the web to recognize nouns and then apply appropriate verbs.
Let’s say a user quickly blogs about a great meal they had at a restaurant and includes a link to the restaurant’s page on CitySearch with no additional information. Our technology is able to identify the link as a noun and understand that it’s about a specific restaurant. A SmartLink is then automatically inserted that includes relevant verbs: read reviews, make a reservation, find it on a map, find nearby bars to grab a drink at afterwards, etc. All of these are for the specific restaurant and all of this is completed automatically and instantly.
- Does this have anything to do with the much-vaunted ‘Web 3.0′? I don’t think anyone knows what’s next for the web. Regardless we don’t want to be known for a label or a buzz word. We want to be known for the value and utility that we bring to individuals. We’re leveraging our technology to enable users to browse smarter and think that the benefits today are already strong and they’re only going to strengthen in the future. You can attach yourself to any number of labels, but at the end of the day it all comes down to people and that’s our focus.
- Do you see Smartlink technology changing the way we use the web? How/not? Yes. Currently we provide the smarts to understand that a page on Amazon is about a thing and can provide instant information that’s contextually correct for that thing. That’s valuable and different from how we currently use the web today, it provides a more efficient method to discover and learn more about the object.
Understanding that a page on Amazon is a particular thing, and that it’s the same thing that’s on a page on Barnes and Noble or in a particular blog post is very valuable. This starts to shift away from a web of pages towards an emerging web of things and individuals will find a lot of value in a web of things
November 21st, 2007
Web 2.0: Don’t call it that!
Describing a company or concept as “Web 2.0″ is so, last half-decade. Nevermind that most people still haven’t heard the phrase. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and poll your office or family: unless you’re not allowed out of the IT dungeon or your family all work as tech-bloggers, my guess is that they haven’t heard or don’t understand the term.
This isn’t really surprising. If you hear about a “new internet phenomenoon” on mainstream news, the chances are it’s either on it’s way out or is so firmly entrenched as to be unremarkable. For a perfect example of this, look up ‘Facebook’ in a national publication and note the language used to describe it’s shiny-new cover–regardless of the fact that most people reading this blog will have been on Facebook (or gone off Facebook) at least a year ago!
It even now seems that there may be a financial impact on describing your new startup as “web 2.0″. According to Mashable!, several VC’s are stating quite clearly that they won’t back Web 2.0. Ihave also noticed talk of bubbles breaking and ‘meteoric rises’ withthe implication that it won’t last very much longer. So many potentialbreak-throughs won’t see their funding if they’re too 2.0.
This phenomenon is firmly entrenched in ‘techy’ social networks likeDigg. When I dugg a news story about the semantic web, I noticed theoverwhelming majority of comments were along the lines of “semantic webis so cliche”, or “Watch out, here comes Semantic Web 2.0, Run!”.Semantic web is a term which has only been widely used recently(relative to “Web 2.0″ which was popularised by web stalwart O’Reilly Way back in 2005) and is already met with derision and sarcastic scorn.
To some extent, I think this is a good thing. If VC’s and financial backers are waking up to this, it means there might be more competitionfor funding and an increase in the quality of online startups. It mightalso mean some updates and refreshing of already-started-ups. Whiletechy scorn is easy to find and probably doesn’t mean too much, the
reality behind the bluster might just be the next set of updates toreal users’ online experiences. Oh, and don’t try calling it “Web 3.0″. Just don’t.
There’s no pleasing everyone, but it seems to me that Web 2.0 is a phenomenon which, if you’re not already using it on a daily basis (onFacebook, following Twitter, using Gmail), it’s probably better not totalk about it. Webby people will start to question your breeding andchoice of apparel!
November 12th, 2007
Implicit Web: a brief introduction
Implicit web is a new concept coined in 2007. Due to the first Defrag conference, discussion of this new term is timely.
Generally this concept implicit web intends to alert us to the fact that besides all the explicit data, services, and links, the Web engages with much more implicit information such as which data users have browsed, which services users have invoked, and which links users have clicked. This type of information is often too boring and tedious for humans to read. So, inevitably, this type of information is only implicitly stored (if stored) on the Web. The implicit web intends to describe a network of this implicit information.
Implicitness Everywhere
Implicit information is everywhere. Implicit information on the Web is about things to which human web users have paid attention. For example, it is about which web pages are frequently read, how often they are read, and who read them. It is also about which services are frequently invoked, how often they are invoked, and who invoked them. Consider the number of web users and how many activities everybody has done daily on the Web, the amount of implicit information must be astonishing. The implicit information co-exists with every web page, every web service, and every web link. In short, great amount of implicitness co-exists with every little piece of explicitness on the Web.
Implicit does not mean insignificant or unimportant. By contrast, implicit web information is often valuable and even crucial in various situations. For example, implicit information of click rates can help editors decide which news are the most popular ones and thus they should put these news on the front page. In similar, the same type of implicit click rates can help salespeople decide which merchandises are among the greatest demanding and so they can arrange the next supply line.
Many companies have already started to collect implicit information and they take benefits from it. Alex Iskold had written a compact introduction on how some companies have utilized implicit information in their products. One well-known example is Amazon.com, which always lists related buyer recommendations with each of its online merchandise. “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought,” many readers must be familiar to this label. And more importantly, many web users do care of the content underneath this label. This is a typical example of how implicit web information helps.
Amazon is not the only company that benefits from implicit information. Amazon is not one of the few companies that benefit from implicit information. In fact, nowadays almost every website that sells something, from baby toys to cars, has some back-end mechanism on analyzing the traffic (a typical implicit information) and adjust their sales plan based on the analysis. Implicitness is indeed everywhere.
Connect Implicitness
Implicitness is everywhere, but is fragmented everywhere. Implicit information on the Web is not connected. This is a problem.
Until now, implicit web information is generally separately stored, typically by individual companies. For example, both Gap.com and jcrew.com have their own stored visitor history but not shared to the other, although we may imagine that this information must be well connectible since both companies sell apparel and accessories. Someone may argue that Gap and J. Crew are competitors. So let us switch the pair to be Banana Republic and Victoria’s Secret. The products of these two companies are well complement (in contrast to compete) to each other. But still the implicit information is isolated to itself, despite that both sides can benefit by connecting this independent implicit information. Readers can find many more this type of examples.
If sharing implicit information among big companies is still questionable (because these big boys hardly believe that they could get help from their little sisters), this type of sharing is much more critical to small websites. There are numerous individual sites that cannot utilize themselves well enough from their own implicit information because they are too small in size. At the same time, however, there are no effective way for them to share and find helpful implicit information, though everybody knows that there is plenty of this information on the Web.
All these discussions lead to one demand: we need the implicit web, which is not there yet. The goal of the implicit web is to defragment all the fragments of implicitness (where the name Defrag is gotten for the conference). But how can we indeed connect all the different types of implicitness on the Web to be a coherent implicit web? This is a grand challenge to the newly formed community of implicit web research. We do not have a clear answer yet.
No matter whatever, however, the solution to the question must be beyond web links. The implicit web engages with complex types of semantics. The amount of information on the implicit web is gigantic. The implicit Web is also very much dynamic. The traditional model of web link is too simple, too shallow, and too static to deal with all these challenges at the same time. We need big, creative thoughts to store and link all the implicitness.
The greatest potential problem to the implicit web is privacy. To companies, some implicit information may be too confidential to be shared. To individual persons, some implicit information may be too private to be public. We need innovative methods of privacy control on the implicit web.
Implicit Web in nutshell
In summary, I briefly list my beliefs about the implicit web.
1. The implicit web is a network that defragments every piece of implicitness on the explicit web, which is the generally known World Wide Web itself.
2. If the explicit web reveals the static side of human knowledge through posted data, services, and links, the implicit web reveals the dynamic side of human knowledge by recording how users access these data, services, and links.
3. The explicit web engages collective human intelligence. The implicit web engages collective human behaviors.
4. The implicit web is not part of the Semantic Web, but they are closely related. If the Semantic Web constructs a conceptual model of World Wide Web, the implicit web constructs a behavior model of World Wide Web.
This post is originally posted at Thinking Space.
November 9th, 2007
Talking about that Semantic Web thing
Opinion, to put it mildly, is somewhat divided on the whole Semantic Web thing.
Is it the same as ‘Web 3.0‘? Or is it simply close enough for the distinction to pale into insignificance amongst those who don’t see counting angels on the heads of pins as a worthwhile pastime?
Is it a neat idea that’s resulted in some great Ph.D research around the world, but wholly impractical for actual implementation? Or does it presage the coming of the hive mind, the thoughts of which will be structured by The One True Ontology?
Is it the natural successor to Web 2.0? Or does it offer some interesting ideas and approaches that can be used to supplement the best of today’s Web with relatively little pain?
All these - and more - are possible reactions to an attitude, an approach, and a set of technologies that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web Consortium, and a multitude of university research departments have been pushing for a very long time.
At Talis, we take the Semantic Web pretty seriously. Not only are we investing significantly in the development of a technology platform that does much of the heavy lifting for those wishing to build semantically enriched applications, but we’re also actively engaged in raising awareness of the possibilities introduced by an increased use of semantic technologies.
The semantic technology market is small, but growing. There is clear value in active cooperation between early adopters, in order to excite growth, to raise awareness, and to spark the creation of opportunities. Through an active Advisory Group, we engage with leading proponents of the Semantic Web; many of whom might traditionally have been seen only as competitors.
Another important way to help understand what’s possible is by letting those who are interested hear other people talking about it. Not everyone can afford the time or money to attend great events like the Web 2.0 Summit, Semantic Technologies, Semantic Web Strategies, etc. For those people, we’ve been working for a while to assemble a (growing) body of podcasts exploring some of the ways in which semantic technologies can be pragmatically and beneficially deployed today.
You can hear, for example, from Nova Spivack, the CEO of Radar Networks who launched Twine in such a well-coordinated campaign at the latest Web 2.0 Summit.
On the investment side, venture capitalist Brad Feld discusses the opportunities for investment in this market, and Mills Davis trails his forthcoming report with some discussion of just how big the semantic technology marketplace could grow.
Tom Ilube of Garlik talks about the role semantic technologies played in enabling his business to take shape, Thomas Vander Wal takes listeners across into the world of folksonomies, and Tom Heath paints a picture of the potential for semantically aware recommendation systems. For the more technically inclined, both David Wood and Paul Gearon dig into the pros and cons of ’semantic databases’ and triple stores.
All these and more have been touched upon in the past year of podcasting, and the enthusiasm and experience communicated by participants is a clear indication of potential in this area.
The media, both technology-focussed and mainstream, is clearly interested in the potential of semantics at the moment. Why not take an opportunity to delve a little deeper, hearing some of the leading proponents in this field dig deep into their experience in order to share with the their audience.
And yes, I’m always looking for new subjects - or suggestions of people you’d like to hear. Drop me a message at paul.miller@talis.com with your comments and ideas.
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