[u.k.: new institute for web science]

 "Department for Business, Innovation and Skills   (National)

The Government today announced the creation of the new Institute for Web Science.

It is designed to make the UK the hub of international research into the next generation of web and internet technologies and their commercialisation, and was announced by the Prime Minister alongside plans for a radical opening up of information and data to put more power in people’s hands. The Institute will conduct research, collaborate with businesses, identify opportunities for social and economic benefit, assist in commercialising research and help Government stimulate demand through procurement.

The web was originally a place where people published documents that users could search and pick up. Web 2.0 has enabled users to contribute and create web content more easily. Web 3.0 will take the web to a whole new level by publishing data in a linkable format so that users and developers can see and exploit the relationships between different sets of information.

The development of these technologies will create significant new opportunities for business and the public sector. The impact of these technologies is likely to be as important as the creation of the original web, and could generate large-scale economic benefits for the UK in the global market for web and internet technologies. The role of the Institute will be to undertake research and development, and act as a bridge between research and business, helping commercialise these new technologies. It will also advise Government on how semantic technologies can be used in the public sector, and how public procurement can be used to speed their adoption.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that £30 million would be set aside to create the Institute for Web Science. It will be headed by Sir Tim Berners Lee, the British inventor of the World Wide Web, and leading Web Science expert Professor Nigel Shadbolt.

Read more here. 

[infusing semantic web into operational data systems]

Patrick West, Peter Fox, Deborah McGuiness and Stephan Zednik from the High Altitude Observatory present their project on integrating data and the semantic web.

From their
"As part of our semantic data framework activities across disciplines from solid-earth, lower, middle and upper terrestrial atmosphere and solar atmosphere to integrative subjects such as climate response and space weather, we have collected a set of experiences: technical, collaboration and social that relate to how easy or hard the infusion process has been. We cover both the semantic web and knowledge infusion as well as underlying service infusion such as catalogs and OPeNDAP data servers."



Interesting points:

• It's easy to identify experts in each field and goo idea to get groups together to provide community support and external buy-in

• Tricky to conduct face-to-face meetings which are imperative to share expert knowledge between disciplines/fields
• Require a general ontology too cross data from one "data catalogue" to another
• tricky to gain access to data holdings etc...which are external to group
  

[folksonomy and thomas vander wal]

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of listening to Thomas Vander Wal share with us his charting of folksonomy, from its beginnings to future possibilities. He began with his definition of folksonomy (which funnily enough, Vander Wal noted, Wikipedia gets wrong):

When Vander Wal spoke about the important aspect of folksonomy, that it is a "social" activity, he reminded us that in a pre-networked world, networking was walking your floppy across the office!

The "f-word" (as Vander Wal puts it) allows "regular" folks to categorise or structure information in a way that is pertinent to them (i.e. personalised).

This aspect of personalisation has important impacts for the business sector in that it allows businesses a view of their product from the customers' point of view. Again, Vander Wal gave us a funny example of how tagging can affect your product by showing us cd available on amazon.com (see here) and how it was tagged:



You wouldn't want your product labelled as "talentless" would you...?

So, with the help of folksonomy, businesses can move from their "top down" approach to a more open and realistic understanding of their product (or at least how it is perceived).

Vander Wal concluded his talk with an excellent visual representation of what he sees happening in certain social networking arenas:




People/users/taggers are moving from employing tags as descriptors for solely personal use to, the other end of the spectrum, where tags seem to be jumping off points for dialogues and stories (that's the bit I'm personally interested in. Especially after noticing on flickr how some photos start so many stories).

As Vander Wal says:

"The people using the tools, including enterprise need to grasp what is possible beyond that is offered and start asking for it. We are back to where we were in 2003 when del.icio.us arrived on the scene, we need new and improved tools that understand what we need and provide usable tools for those solutions. We are developing tag islands and silos that desperately need interoperability and portability to get real value out of these stranded tag silos around or digital life."

NB apologies for the not so great photos! Annoyingly I forgot my camera (such was the excitement to attend the presentation) and to hand was only my blackberry...

[the semantics of the web]

In an interview published yesterday in IT World, the creator of the web talks about how he envisions the future of the semantic web. Here is a sample of the interview, the full text is here.

Berners-Lee: (Laughs) No, I don't do that. I think about real technology. I didn't invent the term "Web 3.0." The Web is constantly developing. If you want to see what's happening that I am interested in now, there are several technologies laced together. In Web 2.0 there are some technologies like JavaScript and others that are all standards that came out of allowing people to do things. Most standards are coming out now that will have a good push towards the mobile Web initiative, which is the use of the Web on lots of different devices.
In the future we will have the Semantic Web that will allow a whole lot of other things. One of the powerful things about networking technology like the Internet or the Web or the Semantic Web, one of the characteristics of such a technology is that the things we've just done with it far surpass the imagination of the people who invented them. Take for example the inventors of TCP/IP, the original protocols for communication between computers over the Internet, created by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn in 1974.
When I invented the Web, I thought of it as an infrastructure; I designed the Web as a foundation for many things. With Web 2.0, social networks and all kinds of things happen on top of it. When the Semantic Web arrives in the next few years, things will be using it in a way we cannot know yet. So, in a way, it's foolish to try to imagine what Web 4.0 will be like when we still don't know what will be done with 3.0.
For Web 3.0 to succeed, the people who are studying it at this moment will have ideas which will enable the new technology. They will design fantastic things just like people with Web 2.0 are designing fantastic things right now. People working with the Semantic Web will make much more powerful things. We can't imagine what they will do. But we have to build the Web to be an infrastructure. It shall never be used for particularized purposes but just to be a foundation for future developments.

[transliteracy colloquium]

Tomorrow is the big day! We'll be sharing our blossoming thoughts on transliteracy with a wide variety of delegates (including Microsoft, the Cartoon Network, Pixel Lab, researchers, practitioners, etc...). I'm looking forward to hearing what transliteracy might mean to an artist or perhaps to an engineer - will be a great learning opportunity.

On the topic of web 2.0 I see the BBC seems to agree with Jakob Nielsen that web 2.0 isn't about *good design*. Hrm...sounds a bit like *authors* who say a narrative isn't a narrative anymore when there is the addition of sound, image, video, etc...apparently words need to be sufficient to create the scene for readers, if words don't do the job, then that's not a good narrative (I have had *real life* authors tell me this btw)...but who says multiple modes actually do the same job as words? Aren't all representational devices different and each has a specific affordance? It all seems a bit to foreboding and reminiscent of the Digitise or Die panel...especially when Nielsen says: "Although people in their late 30s make very different use of the web to those in their teens, Mr Nielsen expects that when those teenagers grow up the time they spend online will diminish." My online use as only increased with age (although not 30...yet!)

[AI Meets Web 2.0: Building the Web of Tomorrow, Today]

Imagine an Internet-scale knowledge system where people and intelligent agents can collaborate on solving complex problems in business, engineering, science, medicine, and other endeavors. Its resources include semantically tagged websites, wikis, and blogs, as well as social networks, vertical search engines, and a vast array of web services from business processes to AI planners and domain models. Research prototypes of decentralized knowledge systems have been demonstrated for years, but now, thanks to the web and Moore’s law, they appear ready for prime time. This article introduces the architectural concepts for incrementally growing an Internet-scale knowledge system and illustrates them with scenarios drawn from e-commerce, e-science, and e-life.

Jay M. Tenenbaum

From AI Magazine, Winter Issue (Volume 27 Number 4)

[semantic web failure?]

Two days ago I blogged about the negative reactions My Space elicits by limiting personalisation (specifically in the case of adding particular widgets to My Space profiles). Interestingly, Stephen Downes sees this kind of mentality as securing the downfall of the semantic web. "The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating."

Read on:

"And I'm saying the semantic web won't work. Can't work.But how do you explain that intuition?And I was thinking about the edgy things of Web 2.0, and where they're working, and more importantly, where they're beginning to show some cracks.A few of key things today:- Yahoo is forcing people to give up their Flickr identities and to join the mother ship, and- MySpace is blocking all the widgets that aren't supported by some sort of business deal with MySpace- the rumour that Google is turning off the search APIAnd that's when I realized:The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating.We are talking about the most conservative bunch of people in the world, people who believe in greed and cut-throat business ethics. People who would steal one another's property if it weren't nailed down. People like, well, Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch.And they're all going to play nice and create one seamless Semantic Web that will work between companies - competing entities choreographing their responses so they can work together to grant you a seamless experience?Not a chance.Now - there are many technical reasons why I think the Semantic Web is a loser, along with some cultural and philosophical reasons. Namely: the people who designed the Semantic Web never read their epistemology texts.But the big problem is they believed everyone would work together:- would agree on web standards (hah!)- would adopt a common vocabulary (you don't say)- would reliably expose their APIs so anyone could use them (as if)Shall I go on?So...Maybe we won't be building clusters in Moncton, maybe we will. I don't know - I'd like to keep trying. Maybe people will listen to us or maybe (more likely) they won't.The future is not in the Semantic Web (or in Java, or in enterprise computing - all for the same reason). Careers based on that premise will founder. Because the people saying all the semantic-webbish things - speak the same language, standardize your work, orchestrate the services - are the people who will shut down the pipes, change the standards, and look out for their own interests (at the expense of yours)."