Daniel’s Blog

Web 2.0 was all about making the web more socially aware, however, was it really a good idea to start a versioning system for the Web?

When Web 2.0 was coined, I got quite excited about it, it was “Yes! this is a new way of thinking, this makes the web more personal”… but I did not thoroughly think through the versioning of the web. Applying 2.0 to the end of the term Web, meant that this is somehow new, somehow better and somehow a superset of what we had before… but it wasn’t, it just clumped pre-existing technologies together under one buzzword which businesses could use.

I fear that this is now happening with the term Web 3.0, which is seen as a swing towards the data. Unfortunately, the term Web 3.0 is being applied as a buzzword already (see the recent post by Paul Krill at InfoWorld titled “Salesforce touts Web 3.0 as platform as a service“, and the post by Simon Wardley titled “3 is the new 2…“).

I say that the Web is the Web, and it will always be the Web… whether it is a Document Web, a Social Web, a Data Web, a Platform Web or an Intelligent Agent Web. When it comes down to it, it will still be the Web, and documents will never be fully replaced by data objects, data objects will never be fully replaced by documents, the social apps won’t replace documents, and intelligent agents won’t replace search engines… things might change slightly, or become slightly more efficient… but essentially it is still the same.

Therefore, I don’t think it is clear when people start versioning the Web… which is why I have started categorising sub-webs, like I have done above. So these Sub-Webs are:

• Document Web: A Web of Documents with hyperlinks between. This Sub-Web provides a subjective view of information from the context perspective of the author.
• Social Web: A Web of Socially Aware Applications. This is done in either, or both Document and Linked Data forms. This Sub-Web provides a subjective view of information from the context perspective of the user or group profiled.
• Linked Data Web: A Web of Data Objects with relationship links between to enhance meaning. This Sub-Web provides an Objective View of information, ready for a contextual perspective of the user.
• Platform Web: A Web of Services in which you can run Web Applications on - and/or - against. This Sub-Web does not provide a view of information, but is an attempt to provide a distributed network of services capable of providing multiple subjective and objective perspectives.
• Intelligent Agent Web: A Web of Intelligent Software Agents. It is a Sub-Web because software agents will talk to each other in order to find out information. This Sub-Web communicates internally objectivity and subjectivity depending on the subjective desires of the user.

The important thing is that each of these Sub-Webs does not replace any other kind of Sub-Web. They can be used all together on the Web. No versioning required or desired.

However, this doesn’t mean that new technologies shouldn’t be looked into and implemented. They definitely should be looked into!  I am just stating that I don’t believe versioning is the best way of labeling technologies, as it is pretty meaningless when something is not better or improved.

Any thoughts?…

Good news for the Semantic Annotator tribe: RDFa is now a candidate recommendation of the W3C “RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing“… which means that RDFa is ready for the mainstream… and actually… RDFa is already being used

Some examples:

• The London Gazette
• Digg
• Various blogs and wikis

If you haven’t checked out RDFa then please do, I was involved with some of the early conversations about RDFa when I was doing my undergraduate project on semantic tagging and annotation.

1995 (and the early 90’s) must have been a visionaries time of dreaming… most of their dreams are happening today.

Watch Steve Jobs (then of NeXT) discuss what he thinks will be popular in 1996 and beyond at OpenStep Days 1995:

• “The Future of Objects, 3/5″ by Steve Jobs (YouTube Video)
• “The Future of Objects, 4/5″ by Steve Jobs (YouTube Video)

Heres a spoiler:

• There is static web document publishing
• There is dynamic web document publishing
• People will want to buy things off the web: e-commerce

The thing that OpenStep propose is:

• WebObjects: an Object Oriented representation of Data available in distributed form over the web

What Steve was suggesting was one of the beginnings of the Data Web! Yep, Portable Distributed Objects and Enterprise Objects Framework was one of the influences of the Semantic Web / Linked Data Web…. not surprising as Tim Berners-Lee designed the initial web stack on a NeXT computer!

I’m going to spend a little time this evening figuring out how much “distributed objects” stuff has been taken from the OpenStep stuff into the Objective-C + Cocoa environment. (<– I guess I must be quite geeky ;-))

OK. It’s a funny title for a blog post, but it is an acronym which I don’t want to start up as a buzzword, but it where I see things going.

A lot of people know about Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), its a set of protocols and formats to allow you to just plug a hardware device into another hardware device and its guaranteed to “just work”. UPnP is all quite low level stuff, which is to be expected because we’re talking about hardware in this case.

The ease of UPnP is starting to appear on the web too, and what I shall (temporarily) call Web Universal Plug and Play (WUPnP). What it’s plugging together is various web applications components.

This started off in the form of open web services which could be “mashed-up” with a nice little GUI (e.g. Nestoria ).

We are now starting to see “mesh-ups”, which are fusions of data from different Linked Data sources to give context-sensitive results to queries.

Mesh-ups and Mash-ups are part of a bigger concept of WUPnP, which is not just about data or how to view it… but everything becomes a little more agnostic, and therefore creating a plug and play architecture.

To do this, we have:

At the Data Level:

• RDF (the framework, with its various socially-friendly vocabularies such as FOAF and SIOC)

At the Machine Interface Level:

• OpenID and OAuth
• OpenSocial
• SPARQL, SPARQL/Update and the SPARQL Protocol

At the User Interface Level:

• Rich Internet Application (RIA) Frameworks (e.g. Flash/Flex/AIR and Yahoo! Browser Plus)
• AJAX / AJAR

Network Level:

• HTTP (in particular REST)
• Cloud Computing (e.g. Amazon EC2)

And the key to this all working is the unique data source name:

The Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)

Without it nothing would be linkable or usable.

I’m not trying to standardise things, I’ll leave that up to the lovely people at the W3C. I’m not even recommending anything, thats up to the W3C and the DataPortability Group. I’m just saying that we have the technologies to be able to plug X into Y into Z, and hey presto we have an awesome app “voila web-scale plug and play”.

An example is a user interface designer could make a user interface in such a way, that it would be able to work with any component that a user may choose. Just for some details, this could be an Adobe Flex based user interface, which could then hook into any Linked Data based encyclopedia (e.g. DBpedia) and provide data in context.

You should be aware by now, from various previous posts that:

• OpenLink Virtuoso provides the Machine Interface Level, the Data Level and the Network Level
• OpenLink Data Spaces provides some User Interface Level functionality and some more functionality on the Machine Interface Level
• OpenLink AJAX ToolKit provides JavaScript, AJAX/AJAR and some funky bits of functionality and eye candy ready for User Interface Level development.

(Yes, there are a lot of acronyms in the computer science field, and particularly the web…. it’s because if we said the long names for everything then we really wouldn’t get anything done because conversations would be about 10 times longer! Unfortunately we have to deal with it)

(If I’ve forgotten anything useful in the WUPnP stack then let me know)

As some of you know, I am a member of the ACM and this lovely bit of news was released last week at some point, but I’ve only just noticed today because it was in the recent ACM MemberNet mailing list email.

The Semantic Web Expert Professor Wendy Hall CBE FREng of the University of Southampton, has won the election to be the President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) between 2008 and 2010.

Well done Wendy, and Good Luck!

More information on the Document Web about various resources mentioned:

• The ACM
• The University of Southampton and its School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and the Intelligence, Agents , Mulitmedia Group.
  
• Wendy’s Homepage

Intro

In the past I have written and talked about the fact that URIs are the key (or ticket) towards making data more semantic (aka “meaningful”). A URI is a unique label for a data object, by giving a unique label to the object you can build relations up with that object, making the object more defined and more meaningful.

Except a URI is a lot more than a simple label, and this is because of the Linked Data rule of making URIs “gettable” via HTTP. Because the URI is available via HTTP it can be seen as a data structure which describes how to get to a specific data source.

And now to talk about Data Source Names (DSNs).

Data Source Names

A DSN is a data structure which represents the connection to a specific data source, this has traditionally been within the database realm and more specifically with ODBC. However, it does not have to be strictly ODBC nor strictly database… it could be any data source of any kind.

Data Source Names are synonymous with Uniform Resource Identifiers

You would have noticed that the description of the Linked Data URI and the description of the DSNs are very similar, in fact, there is no difference at all! Therefore on the Linked Data Web a Uniform Resource Identifier is a Data Source Name. Simple as that!

Now you can start to see what Kingsley, I and the rest of OpenLink are trying to convey when we mention WODBC. The Linked Data Web is fully explainable using existing database terminology (e.g. URIs are DSNs), which is then built up creating a web of data connections, establishing Web Open DataBase Connnectivity.

Kingsley gives a description of WODBC and a comparison with the traditional ODBC.

Following my previous post on “The Tribes of the Semantic Web“. There is another Semantic Tribe: The RDFization Tribe.

The RDFization(or RDFisation to be slightly more English English) Tribe. RDFization is quite a simple term to understand if you think about it, because “isation” means the process of turning into something, and RDF is RDF…. therefore RDFisation is turning something into RDF. This is a mechanical process, and therefore automatic.

RDFization will take unstructured or semistructured text and use Statistical and AI techniques (such as Natural Language Processing and Latent Semantic Indexing) in order to extract named entities (and relationships), decypher subjects and disambiguate naming.

The people that take this approach are not necessarily “Semantic Purists” (who also use AI Techniques) because the idea here is to extract data which can be linked with the relevant object (as a foreign key represents an object). With RDFization the clever stuff happens at the higher (semistructured or free text) level, rather than in the heart (data) level which the “Semantic Purists” deal with.

RDFization is theoretically the same as Alex Iskold’s “Top-Down Approach“, except I have two problems with the term “Top-Down Approach”.

1. “Top-Down”/”Bottom-up” is very one dimensional. There are lots of ways to encapsulate semantics into a data source.
2. “Top-Down”/”Bottom-up” is used in so many other aspects of computer science, and all instances of these terms tend to have different meanings or different perceptions.

The Semantic Web / Linked Data is clear, it is to provide meaning in any/every way possible whether that through annotation, fully structured descriptions, “RDFization” through AI/Statistical means or some other way.

More information about RDFization

If you do a search for RDFization on Kingsley Idehens blog, you get some very interesting blog posts about RDFization.

Kingsley Idehen, my boss, Talked with Talis earlier this month. I’ve just listened to it.

He specifically talked about the business benefits of Linked Data and the Semantic Web.

It is available: “Talking with Talis: Kingsley Idehen talks about OpenLink Software, Linked Data and the Semantic Web“.

This talk is very well worth a listen because it is very much from a business point of view. He uses very business-orientated use cases to build up the big picture of Linked Data. It is not overly technical, but the average technologist should also find the episode interesting too.

You’ll notice that Kingsley and I give descriptions in very similar ways. We both describe things in one particular way, and then describe in at least one other different way. This is incredibly important for being a good teacher and a good Technology Evangelist. The reason for doing this is because different people do different things, and different people do those things in different ways.

People have different ways of understanding different things, hence why religion/faith is so varied and hence why some people prefer an open source system and why others prefer a proprietory system. There is no way of getting away from these differences, however, it is good to build bridges between them. Therefore, a good teacher or technology evangelist will describe things in different ways, which builds bridges in between different domains of knowledge and understanding.

I’ve gone slightly off on a tangent a little, mainly because I feel very strongly about this “building bridges” model. Maybe it is a case for another blog post at some time. So, anyway, I highly recommend listening to the Talking with Talis episode with Kingsley…. very much well worth it!!!

I’ve decided two things to do for the StraightWalker wordpress theme:

1. Start an independent StraightWalker blog (with the latest release). DONE: http://vanirsystems.com/straightwalker
2. Release the code on googlcode. DONE: http://code.google.com/p/straightwalker/

I haven’t had much chance to look at the bug that is causing problems loading up specific posts/pages, and hopefully I will be able to soon. The code is available to download and look at if you wish, it is very buggy but you are very welcome to help me iron out the bugs and turn some of the static stuff more dynamic, just send me an email or skype message me and I’ll put you on the project member list in googlecode.

The Tribes of the Semantic Web

There are actually tribes within the Semantic Web:

These include:

• The Linked Data Purist
• The Semantic Annotator
• The Semantics Purist
• The Semantic Insider

Generally this is because they prefer a certain architecture over another, but I am not saying that each is exclusive. There are people in the community which straddle two or more of the tribes.

The Linked Data Purist

The Linked Data Purist will have links out to various open data objects, and will provide content negotiation in a Human-Friendly format (e.g. HTML) and in a Linked Data format (e.g. RDF). Languages like SPARQL and SPARUL would be provided to query and update the Internal Data Graph Model.

The Linked Data Purists Architecture

The Document Web Developer and the Linked Data Developer

Its possible to add a layer on top of the SQL based Relational Database, to create “RDF Views”. This allows the developer to play with the data in either SQL or SPARQL formats:

Linked Data WITH Document Web Architecture

The Semantic Annotator

The Semantic Annotator will use an annotation language to embed semantics into the document they are providing (whether thats XML, XHTML or HTML). Frameworks such as RDFa, Microformats, eRDF and AB Meta are used in this case:

The Semantic Annotator Architecture

The Semantic Insider

A Semantic Insider will have closed data due to privacy or licensing, they only provide an interface on the data with little or no links out, and certainly no links coming in directly to objects. The only real reason for hiding data like this is because of privacy or licensing, if privacy or licensing are not an issue then opening up the data is promoted by the Linked Data tribe.

The Semantic Inside Architecture

The Semantics Purist

The Semantics Purist enjoys getting the real semantics working for each and every object. They will use OWL extensively, and will understand Descriptions Logic. The Semantics Purist does this in order to use the many semantic inferencing tools available.

(No diagram for this one, because it varies… some aren’t web based, some are…. most use some kind of deep inferencing)

Tribes are bad, Linking is key

Tribes are bad, they split communities up when they could really do with being together and more universal… we would probably get a lot more done if we did what we were promoting not just for data but for intercommunication. Linking Data is important, yes, but Linking together between the existing tribes is even better. This is a call to those in the Semantic Web / semantic web community.

Bishop John Shelby Spong (a well known Liberal Episcopalian Christian Bishop) often talks about the Tribal Identity/Mentality of Christians through the ages. This can happen within the Web Development/Design world too, it happens to/from the Semantic Web community (e.g. some people see the Semantic Web as “too academic”, which is rubbish because most of it isn’t) and also within it (e.g. Microformats versus RDF or RDFa).

“It is a magnificent feeling to recognize the unity of complex phenomena which appear to be things quite apart from the direct visible truth” - Albert Einstein

“Where there is unity there is always victory” - Publilius Syrus

So I leave you with a picture of “Minerva of Peace” by Elihu Vedder:

Minerva of Peace by Elihu Vedder. (From Wikipedia “Minerva of Peace“)