When you see facebook adopting a version of RDFa then you can assume you are onto something.  And now we’ve seen this.

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Main focus of the book  seems to be Bruce Mau and his approach to Design – of his philosophy re Design and its place in the world.

The ‘Glimmer Principles’ are:

Ask Stupid Questions, Jump Fences, make hope visible, Go deep, Work the metaphor, Design what you do. Face consequences. Embrace constraints, Design for emergence and BEGIN ANYWHERE.

The book and the examples are built around these principles.

There are basic entry level introductions to a number of frameworks and concepts e.g. Doblin Inc.’s five phases of a consumer experience: attraction, entry, engagement, exit, extension (pp 134-137).

As someone who has been involved in BPR for many years now I could certainly relate to the principles referenced.  Asking Stupid Questions and Going Deep are critical to any effort.  I think current focus on lean processes in start ups also echoes many of the ket principles, in particular Make Hope Visible and Face Consequences – in the context of maximising learning/ experimentation with the potential users of the solution.

In summary, I found the book more to be an interesting introduction to Mau and a number of other Designers rather than a ‘how to’ type book.  In this sense I found the title a little misleading and the book a little disappointing.  On the positive side the book is a call to action for everyone to put on their Designer Hat – that design is not something limited to a small few creative types.

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Was I excited?

On a personal level I have found a number of these products useful e.g. feedly.  And they do represent some interesting development and practical examples of various elements of the semantic toolbox.

But not that exciting.

Working with business executives looking to uderstand the relevance of semantic web to them not sure that this range of products will excite them.  In fact don’t think it will.

I am beginning to think that we should think of semantics in terms of a set of tools and standards designed to enable us to get more from the web.  Web 3.0 seems to me to suggest a new web – I don’t see that at present.

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• Business intelligence (BI)
• Data mining (across structured and unstructured
  data stores
• E-discovery (across centralized and distributed
  data stores)
• Customer relationship management (CRM) systems,
  leveraging the entirety of the social networking fabric
• Dynamic business rules (inference engine)
  optimization
• Ontology-based security/trust credentialing,
  private social networks, and public referral/viral
  product marketing using FOAF (Friend of a Friend),
  POWDER (Protocol for Web Description Resource),
  and other maturing standards
• Extract, transform, load (ETL) services (RDF-izers),
  which automatically transform and publish enterprise
  data into private and/or public ontological stores
• Embedded control, telemetry, and data acquisition
  systems relating to devices, equipment, and sensors,
  including (but not limited to) enablement of smart
  grid3 energy management systems

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Read an interesting survey re traction around the semantic web.  Listed a number of barriers to adoption of semantic web:

1. organisational culture
2. the complexity of the technology
3. a general lack of experts
4. a lack of success stories
5. a lack in quality of available software and
6. the problem to quantify the benefits

I thought it would be interesting to consider each of thse in some more detail in a series of postings – designed to assist in promoting a greater understanding of semantic web and its potential use.  Would welcome any feedback/ ideas on this subject.

The referenced survey targeted a fairly technical, web savy, group, across Europe.  Am keen to engage more directly with business poeple – amongst many of whom I am not sure there is a clear understanding of, or interest in, the semantic web.

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This is the sort of subject of real import which gets thrown up by the internet.   Good to see ongoing coverage in Technology section of the newspaper.  However this is far too important to be left to those interested in technology.  This requires debate amongst politicians, academics – assisted by technologists as may be relevant.  Easy for major developments of this type to go relatively uncovered in the times in which we live – given the economic difficulties dominating the agenda.

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On the same theme interesting piece by Linda Moulton – the line ‘enterprises must commit to having very smart people with enterprise expertise to build the ontology’  rings the same bell.

Linda Moulton believs that real progress in adoption of semantic web will be seen first within entertprises, later between enterprises and across the web more generally.  Seems to make a lot of sense and be the most likely scenario – however we may prefer the more holistic soltuion to emrge immediately.

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We’ve had significant tax increases.  We’re still waiting for the plans on cost cutting.  Media speculation is that the current government may struggle to bring in another tough budget (if they don’t and a replacement government doesn’t then the IMF will do it for us – god forbid).

Need a National Government – FF & FG – prmoting a structured plan for recovery over a three – five year time frame: pushing through radical reform on the cost side, not simply increasing taxation.

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