Category Archives: semantic web

Explaining the semantic web

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We’ve just had the great semantic web conference, semtech, on West Coast.  Lots of interest, new initiatives, buzz.

Have been fielding more questions from the general populace – what is the semantic web?  Have tended to focus on the difference between being able to access data rather than documents over the web.  I think the other key is explaining that the semantic web is designed to enable computer software to aggregate, analyse, present data from the web – without human interaction.

@mirkolorenz on twitter brought my attention to a short 5 minute video from the last Davos conference which gets the essence across.  For the next number of week I will be directing my friends and colleagues to this video for a snappy, relevant, dynamic explanation of semantic web…if a picture can paint a thousand words..

Thanks Tom Llube – i think you nailed it.

linked data – lots of upside but major rethinking required

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Linked data poses some interesting questions for us as individuals and in our organisations. Traditionally we have held that information is power – and therefore have guarded our information. Much of the time this has included guarding our data. To make linked data work we are looking to encourage much greater publications and sharing of data.

I was recently looking to complete some research on behalf of a client. It required me to review financial and operational information (including annual reports) for approx. 50 global companies. After some google work I ended up looking through a whole series of pdf files – available on the internet – and compiling my own analysis. And I have no easy way of updating this analysis.

However if this data were published in a different format – to facilitate its being read and analysed by computer applications – then this analysis would have been available to me instantaneoulsy. And updating the analysis would be trivial.

Back to safeguarding our data and/or information. If you have invented coca cola and have the secret formula then you want to keep this secret. Your concern is that you have a fantastic product and you want to maintain your competitive advantage.

If you are a soft drinks manufacturer you probably also know what percentage of nine year old males, living in any particular catchment area, drink your product more than once per month. This data is also of value to you – perhaps in terms of planning marketing campaigns, advertising initiatives, pricing plans. But perhaps you would be willing to share this information – in order to be able to correlate it with information that other groups may have about habits of youth in a particular neighbourhood.

Is there any real point in people the world over wasting time effectively completing the same analyses – in private companies, government bodies, voluntary organisations? Is it not an incredible waste of time? In fact, in an era when we have finally begun to concern ourselves with energy waste can we not recognise that this duplication (many times over) of effort is a major societal waste of time?

We have driven some of the sharing of data through initiatives re disclosure – to protect shareholders, citizens, etc. However we have not yet got to the point where we are rewarding companies and organisations for making more of their data available in useable formats. There are major potential savings and benefits if we can change the mindset.

I do not underestimate the challenge faced. Our business training and experience has been to develop and maintain competitive advantage through having greater insights, knowledge, etc. What the semantic web is suggesting is that to succeed we should be much more generous with our own data – in order to gain access to far richer and deeper data, while at the same time serving the common good. We now need to see real sample models for people and companies adapting and succeeding with this approach.

Ireland – leading the way in eLearning and semantic web

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Spent the morning at a workshop run by DERI (Digital Enterprise Research Institute) at Enterprise Ireland.  If we spent more time focusing on what we can achieve through the likes of DERI and the Irish Learning Alliance (ILA) we might begin to dig ourselves out of our current difficulties.

Excellent presentations by Johnny Parkes, Bill McDaniel, Liam Moran and Mark Leyden.

Web 3.0 – in terms of getting at the data across the web – has great potential.  Poses interesting challenges/ questions for organisations traditionally obsessed with confindentiality of their data.  However for those who understand and resolve the connundrum (sharing their data) web 3.0 offers the potential of much greater insights and decision making.

Distinguishing Web 3.0, Semantic web and Data Linking

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I had commented some time ago on the differences/ advances between web 1.0, web 2.0 and web 3.0.

Earlier this month Greg Boutin published an excellent series of three postings in which he has looked at web 3,0, semantinc web and data linking in consdierable detail – in an attempt to ensure that we have a common understanding (ie get the semantics right).  His postings alos cross reference to some of his own previous postings and an excellent TED talk by Kevin Kelly.

Kelly talks about the interent becoming the ‘One’ computer – and therefore topics such as ubiquity, transparency, personalisation and globalisation.  It is a fascinating look into the future – and challenges us all to think about how we would interact with this large ‘organism’ or system.

Boutin is also very much up for the challenge and the opportunity.  However he is relatively cautious in his assessment of the situation in his third posting.  While not doubting Berners Lee, he does seem to suggest that the hype may be a little ahead of the reality – as evidenced by the lack of commercial applications exploiting linked data (there being a shortage of linked data).

twitter v. google for (re)search

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Where would we be without google (search)?  It has opened up a world of information for all of us.   But what now as twitter gets a real foothold.  It feels a little like the difference between listening to an hourly nes bulletin and reading a daily newspaper.  Perhaps with Google I can find the more comprehensive and more considered answer.  But with twitter I feel like I ma getting the current answer – like a news alert.

Interesting times.  Particularly becasue the nature of search/ research is changing – as web 3.0/ semantic web emerges.  Google, as expected, has been quick to look to leverage more effective ways of searching/ indexing data.  But these techniques are also availabel to twitter.

Moving on from traditional thinking

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I guess it’s challenging for all of us who have worked for the last 25 years.  In my final year in Trinity College Dublin I was writing Assembler for the Motorola 68000 chip.  The Mac was about to burst on the scene.  Since then I have worked in a Professional Service Firm, my own IT consulting business and with a number of start up businesses.

Many of us have come to think of the business entity as the key business unit – be it a company, a group of companies, a sole trader, a partnership.  And businesses do business with other businesses – ordering, buying, selling, etc.  And each business operates to a set of standards – standards to meet their own expectations and those of their customers.  Many of the standards are driven, underpinned or enforced by external agencies e.g. State, Professional bodies, Insurerers, regulators.

The web has had all sorts of impacts on business – the emergence of online B2B abd B2C, major reengineering of processes and business themselves, globalisation on a par not expected.

And now the web is throwing new opportunities and challenges at all of us.  In fact one can only wonder if we had had this web 10 years ago what types of businesses would have been built over the last 10 years?  Which businesses would never have existed?

Even back in 1984 in TCD we were collaborating – as we worked in a group of three students to design our basic computer.  We also collaborated on the cricket field as we set traps for opposition batsmen.  And we collaborated in preparing for exams – through sharing of lecture notes, etc.

But what we are witnessing now is a series of developments – Social networking, Semantic web, the cloud – which when combined mean that those who do not collaborate risk being eliminated.  We have often discussed the importance of knowledge management within the organisation – even between partner organisations.  However the tools beginning to emerge now promise to facilitate collaboration and knowledge management on a scale previously unimagined – right across the globe, the web and time.  ultimately traditional business practices and structures must be transformed to enable society to benefit from what’s beginning to happen.

Semantic web in Ireland

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On a day of doom and gloom – the emergency budget in Ireland – was lucky enough to spend a couple of uplifting hours in the Institute of European Affairs, Ireland (www.iiea.com).

I was listening to and interacting with Liam Moran, business development manager, Digitial Enterprise Reseach Institute (Galway, Ireland).  DERI (www.deri.com) is the type of thing this country needs (‘The vision of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute is to be recognised as the leading international web science research institute interlinking technologies, information and people to advance business and benefit society’).  Set up with some real foresight, backed by the Irish government and Europe, real leadership (including Tim Berners Lee) and lots of brilliant minds.

Very exciting applications emerging from the research – the latest being SIOC to be adotped by the US government.  Visit the site (www.deri.com) for a better insight.

Liam gave a comprehensive review of Web o, 1, 2 & 3 and painted some great images of what could happen.

One particular observation caught my attention – how do we avoid getting bogged down in simply copying (even plagiarising) others to the exclusion of original, creative, thought?  Not being a music composer I often wonder where song writers continue to come up with new ideas?  Reminds me in some wasy of being back in school – when you were studying Shakepeare did you try to understand Hamlet for yourself and provide your own analysis/ commentary or did you simply buy ‘Coles Notes’ and regurgitate the standard bumph?

Tagging and web 3.0

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I have been using faviki (www.faviki.com) rather than del.icio.us for last 10 days or so.  Just read a luke warm review of ‘zigtag’ - another effort at helping us understand each other tags.   Interesting argument – have we just become fed up of the whole ‘tagging thing’?

I suppose it takes me back to the basic discussion with anyone implementing any document management type solution – it’s a balance between the effort you put in when loading/ storing/ categorising/ tagging the documents and the benefits you gain when searching/ retrieving/ sharing the documents.

Would be interested to hear how people have done using either of these semantic web type tagging options.