Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Gates Versus Jobs
I enjoy watching these two giants go at it. Can you feel the tension and the cutting competition? This is just part two. Watch the whole series. This is a session from the All Things Digital Web 3.0 conference.
Monday, June 01, 2009
The Semantic Way
(1) Linked Data Initiative - In order for the Web to be move from a messy, siloed, and unregulated frontier, the SemWeb will require a standards-based approach, one which data on the Web would become interchangeable formats. By linking data together, one could find and take pieces of data sets from different places, aggregate them, and use them freely and accessibly. Because of this linking of data, the Web won't be limited to just web-based information, but ultimately to the non-Web-based world. To a certain extent, we are already experiencing this with smart technologies. Semantic technologies will help us extend this to the next version of the Web, often ambiguously dubbed Web 3.0.
(2) Resource Description Framework - RDF is key to the SemWeb as it allows for the federation of Web data and standards, one which uses XML to solve a two-dimension relational database world cannot. RDF provides a global and persistent way to link data together. RDF isn't a programming language, but a method (a metahporical "container") for organizing the mass of data on the Web, while paving the way for a fluid exchange of different standards on the Web. In doing so, data is not in cubes or tables; rather, they're in triples - subject-predicate-object combinations that provide for a a multidimensional representation and linking of the Web, connecting nodes in an otherwise disparate silo of networks.
(3) Ontologies and Taxonomies - LIS and cataloguing professionals are familiar with these concepts, as they often form the core of their work. The SemWeb moves from taxonomic to an ontological world. While ontologies describe relationships in an n-dimensional manner, easily allowing information from multiple perspectives, taxonomies are limited to hierarchical relationships. In an RDF environment, ontologies provide a capability that extends the utility of taxonomies. The beauty of ontologies is that it can be linked to another ontology to take advantage of its data in conjunction with your own. Because of this linkability, taxonomies are clearly limited as they are more classification schemes that primarily describe part-whole relationships between terms. Ontologies are the organizing, sense-making complement to graphs and metadata, and mapping among ontologies is how domain-level data become interconnected over the data Web.
(4) SPARQL and SQL - It overcomes the limits of SQL because SPARQL because graphs can receive and be converted into a number of different data formats. In contrast, the rigidness of SQL limits the use of table structures. In constructing a query, one has to have knowledge of the database schema; with the abstraction of SPARQL, this problem is solved as developers can move from one resource to another. As long as data messages in SPARQL reads within RDF, tapping into as many data sources becomes inherently possible. De-siloing data was not possible without huge investment of time and resources; with semantic technologies, anything is possible.
(5) De-siloing the Web - This means is that we would need to give up some degree of control on our own data if we wish to have a global SemWeb. This new iteration of the Web takes the page-to-page relationships of the link document Web and augments them with linked relationships between and among individual data elements. By using ontologies, we can link to data we never included in the data set before, thus really "opening" up the Web as one large global database.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
The Industrial Web
In the Journal of Social Computing, Peter Sweeney argues that whatever we call Web 3.0, it is going to be a the automation of tasks which displaces human work. Our information economy is ultimately in the midst of an Industrial Revolution. He makes another excellent point:
Billions are being spent worldwide on semantic technologies to create the factories and specialized machinery for manufacturing content. Railways of linked data and standards are being laid to allow these factories to trade and co-operate. And the most productive information services in the world are those that leverage Web 3.0 industrial processes and technologies. Web 3.0 is a controversial term, as it confuses those who are just only beginning to feel comfortable with the concept Web 2.0 and those who are embracing the Semantic Web. Web 3.0 disrupts these traditional, safe thoughts. It not only blurs the terminology, it also offers business advocates an opportunity to cash in.
But I see Sweeney's arguments as a multidimensional argument that transcends nickels and dimes. He makes an excellent point when he argues that many dismiss Web 3.0 as a fad; however, when we think of the Web as a manufacturing process, that is a disruptive technology -- very much like the Industrial Revolution -- then we can begin to understand what Web 3.0 represents.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Kumos to you MSN
Bing is a combination of Microsoft's Live Search search engine and semantic Web technology (which Microsoft had quietly acquired in Powerset last July, 2008). It is said that Kumo is designed as a "Google killer" in mind. However, not without a cost.
It's been reported that the amount of resources Microsoft had spent on Kumo has caused deep divisions within the vendor's management. Many within the hierarchical monolith are arguing for staying put with the companie's money-making ways rather than spreading it elsewhere on fruitless desire for the holy search grail.
This is important new developments for information professionals - especially librarians - to take note. While the Semantic Web adds structure to Web searches in the backend technology, what users will see in the front end is increased structure such as the search results in the center of the page and a hierarchical organization of concepts or attributes in the left (or right)-hand column. This could be what Bing ultimately looks like.
What this implies is that with so much of the spotlight currently on "practical" social media and Web 2.0 applications, much is happening underneath the surface among the information giants. Google itself is quietly conducting much research into the SemWeb. Who will be the first to achieve Web sainthood? Until last week, we thought it was these guys.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
The Web 3.0 Hoopla
In turbulent economic times, it is critically important to understand what opportunities exist to make our businesses run better. The emergence of a new era of technologies, collectively known as Web 3.0, provides this kind of strategically significant opportunity.The core idea behind web 3.0 is to extract much more meaningful, actionable insight from information. At the conference, we will explore how companies are using these technologies today, and should be using them tomorrow, for significant bottom line impact in areas like marketing, corporate information management, customer service, and personal productivity.
I would be hesitant to accept this definition of Web 3.0, particularly when the words "in turbulent economic times." It's awfully reminiscent of how Web 2.0 had started: the burst of the dot-c0m economy in 2001, which lead to programmers convening at the first Web 2.0 conference. For better or worse, Web 2.0 was born; but it was never endorsed by academia. The creators of the internet never envisioned for Web 2.0 technologies; the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) never had Web 2.0 standards. Rather, the Semantic Web has its roots from the very beginning.
Unfortunately, I fear the same is happening with Web 3.0. Much is being slapped by corporate and technology interests and labelled "Web 3.0." Because of the downturn in the economy, information professionals beware.
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Swine Flu and the World Wide Web Scour
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Twittering the Digu Way
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
World Digital Library Coming to a Computer Near You!
The Library not only offers an array of books, maps, manuscripts and films from around the world, in seven different languages, it ultimately aims to bridge a cultural divide not only by offering people in poorer countries the same access to knowledge as those in richer ones - but also by making available the cultural heritage of Asian, Africa, Middle Eastern, and Latin American cultures.
Friday, April 10, 2009
The Waves of Cellphones Use
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Michael Stephens in Vancouver, BC
Michael Stephens is one of my favourite librarians. One of the most enjoyable things is the memories of how libraries affect a person's memories and shape a person's life. This is a very honest, intimate discussion of Stephens' love of libraries. He's coming to Vancouver for the upcoming British Columbia Library Association 2009 conference. I'm looking forward to it.
Monday, March 23, 2009
A Time To Be An Information Professional
And thus is the profession of librarianship. Perhaps we will be known by another title, another name, as some of us already are known as metadata managers, taxonomists, information architects, and knowledge managers. Library schools have evolved into I-Schools. Who knows, LIS might evolve the point where it not longer is recognizable to us -- as the apothecary is no longer recognizable to the pharmacist. But the art of searching, sharing knowledge, collecting, organizing, and disseminating information in whatever shape and form they may be, will never change. And hence, whatever we may become, we will never change.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
The Search Continues . . . .
Search algorithms today are largely based on a common paradigm: link
analysis. But they've ignored a mother lode of data: The network.
Nicely said. Although there are a multitude of variations of search algorithms, architectures and tweaks, search technology has been based largely on three canonical approaches. In a nutshell, here they are:
1) Human-powered directories - Hierarchically organized into taxonomies (e.g. Yahoo!)
2) Crawler-based index - Generates results largely prioritized by link analysis. (e.g. Google)
3) Collaborative tagging - Users tag pages with keywords so that future searchers can find
However, these three options still fail to prevent click fraud and also content unreacheable in the Deep Web. Weinman proposes the Network Service Providers as a fourth option, which uses data and metadata associated with the actual network transport of Web content—including HTML pages, documents, spreadsheets, almost anything —to replace and/or augment traditional Web crawlers, improve the relevance and currency of search results ranking, and reduce click fraud. A network service provider could better determine aggregate surfing behavior and hold times at sites or pages, in a way sensitive to the peculiarities of browser preferences and regardless of whether a search engine is used.
Weinman's proposal is an interesting deviation to the thoughts of Semantic Web enthusiasts. It does throw a quirk into the speculation of the future of Web search technology. And so the search continues . . .
Monday, March 09, 2009
Searching Search Like a Yandex
What is interesting is that Yandex's search algorithm is rooted in the highly inflected and very peculiar Russian language. Words can take on some 20 different endings to indicate their relationship to one another. Like the many other non-English languages, this inflection makes the language of Russian precise, but makes search extremely difficult. Google fetches the exact word combination you enter into the search bar, leaving out the slightly different forms that mean similar things. However, Yandex is unique in that it does catch the inflection. Fortune has written an interesting article on Yandex, and my favourite part is its examination into the unique features of this Russian search giant:
While some of its services are similar to offerings available in the U.S. (blog rankings, online banking), it also has developed some applications that only Russians can enjoy, such as an image search engine that eliminates repeated images, a portrait filter that ferrets out faces in an image search, and a real-time traffic report that taps into users' roving cellphone signals to monitor how quickly people are moving through crowded roads in more than a dozen Russian cities.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
BBC's Semantic Web
considering how best to build websites we’d recommend you throw out the Photoshop and embrace Domain Driven Design and the Linked Data approach every time. Even if you never intend to publish RDF it just works. The longer term aim of this work is to not only expose BBC data but to ensure that it is contextually linked to the wider web.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Shame on You Wall Street Journal
It is regrettable. Our reporters do have access to multiple databases including Factiva and this migration to digital databases as you has been happening for many years.
Sure. Good luck with having your reporters spend up to ten times the amount of time it would take to find information a trained information professional could obtain for you in a fraction of the time. A librarian is like the glue that holds the house together. You can only go so far and so long without a librarian's information retrieval skills before the infrastructure cracks and crumbles. Particularly in our emergine Web 2.0 world of social media and open access resources, can a company survive alone without expert information and knowledge management? Best of luck Wall Street Journal.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Video Sharing for Librarians
I recently presented at TOTS. What is video sharing Whyshould we care? How can be of use for information professionals? What are some issues for us to consider? Let's take a look together.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Who Video Shares? Barack Obama Does!
Who uses Web 2.0 to its fullest capacity? Barack Obama does. The President posts regularly to Vimeo. Vimeo is different in that it offers High-definition content. On October 17, 2007, Vimeo announced support for High Definition playback in 1280x720 (720p), becoming the first video sharing site to support consumer HD.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Mashups at PSP 2009
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Is Youtube The New Search?
I found some videos that gave me pretty good information about how it mates, how it survives, what it eats,” Tyler said. Similarly, when Tyler gets stuck on one of his favorite games on the Wii, he searches YouTube for tips on how to move forward. And when he wants to explore the ins and outs of collecting Bakugan Battle Brawlers cards, which are linked to a Japanese anime television series, he goes to YouTube again. . .
“When they don’t have really good results on YouTube, then I use Google."
What does this mean? Are Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter going to take down the venerable goliath Google? Not really. I argued in an article that this is the phenomenon of social search. Are things finally catching up?
Monday, January 26, 2009
Ushahidi as a Mashup
I'm going to be talking soon about mashups. (And getting nervous about it, too). One mashup that I will be discussing is Ushahidi. It's an excellent example of how Web 2.0 is saving lives. Using technology to harness peace. More to come. Here is an excellent slide show of Ushahidi.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Nova on the Future of the Web
(2) The Browser is Going to Swallow Up the Desktop
(3) The focus of the desktop will shift from information to attention
(4) Users are going to shift from acting as librarians to acting as daytraders
(5) The Webtop will be more social and will leverage and integrate collective intelligence
(6) The desktop of the future is going to have powerful semantic search and social search capabilities built-in
(7) Interactive shared spaces will replace folders
(8) The Portable Desktop
(9) The Smart Desktop
(10) Federated, open policies and permissions
(11) The personal cloud
(12) The WebOS (Web operating system)
(13) Who is most likely to own the future desktop?
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Topic Maps and the SemWeb
In the same posting, Steve Pepper, an independent researcher, writer and lecturer who has worked with open standards for structured information for over two decades, made a very interesting comment. He argues that:
Indeed, the Topic Maps 2008 Conference in Oslo, Norway, April 2-4 has just concluded. So what are topic maps, and why are they relevant for libraries and information organizations? The basic idea is simple: the organizing principle of information should not be where it lives or how it was created, but what it is about. Organize information by subject and it will be easier to integrate, reuse and share – and (not least) easier for users to find. The increased awareness of the importance of metadata and ontologies, the popularity of tagging, and a growing interest in semantic interoperability are part and parcel of the new trend towards subject-centric computing.
Topic maps is really spearheading is nothing short of a paradigm shift in computing -- the notion of subject-centric computing -- which will affect far more than just the Web.
We've let programs, applications, and even documents occupy centre-stage for far too long. This is topsy-turvy: users are primarily interested in subjects (what the information is about), not how it was created or where it lives. We need to recognize this, and effect the same kind of change in information management that object-orientation effected in programming; hence the need for a subject-centric revolution.
This conference brings together these disparate threads by focusing on an open international standard that is subject-centric to its very core: ISO 13250 Topic Maps, which is interestingly what Katherine Adams had pointed out eight years ago. We're getting closer. The pieces are in place. We just need a good evening to frame together the picture.
Monday, January 12, 2009
hakia and Librarians' Race to End the Search Wars
However, besides QDEX (Quality Detection and Extraction) technology, which indexes the Web using SemanticRank algorithm, a solution mix from the disciplines of ontological semantics, fuzzy logic, computational linguistics, and mathematics, hakia also relies on the subject knowledge expertise of professionals. By combining technology and human expertise, it attempts to completely redefine the search process and experience. Take a look at my hakia, Search Engines, and Librarians How Expert Searchers Are Building the Next Generation Web for a deeper analysis of what hakia is trying to do with librarians. Hopefully, it offers more food for thought.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
A New Web 2.0 Journal
Thanks Dean for recommending this journal to me. It's an excellent read so far.Admittedly, Web 2.0 is a hard concept to get one’s arms totally around as it means anything involving “user content”. This broad definition covers everything from social networks, such as Facebook, to 3D Virtual Reality Worlds, such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, with many, many stops in between. The unifying feature in all of the Web 2.0 systems and tools is that they differ fundamentally from Web 1.0, which is a one-way connection, in which information sources, vendors, advertisers, etc. present information for the reader to consume and / or respond to (the fact that a user may choose to buy on-line from Amazon or Sears does not make those sites something other than Web 1.0 since the user was not the one to initiate the content).