Monday, January 07, 2008
Pragmatic Web as HD TV
Rather than waiting for everyone to come together and collaborate -- that could take forever or worse yet . . . never -- the best hope might be to encourage the emergence of communities of interest and practice that develop their own consensus knowledge on the basis of which they will standardize their representations. Thus, the vision of the Pragmatic Web is to augment human collaboration effectively by appropriate technologies. Thus, the Pragmatic Web complements the Semantic Web by improving the quality and legitimacy of collaborative, goal-oriented discourses in communities.
I liken this scenario to High-definition Television. By 2010, the majority of programming in North America will move to HDTV specifications, thus effectively removing other TV formats such as plasma TV's from competition. In the meantime, consumers are free to continue using their existing TV sets. The Web could very well employ this model, as it's logical and crosses the path of least damage. Using the HD TV scenario, Web users can continue using their current browsers and existing ways of surfing while those who want to maximize the full potential of the Web will use Semantic Web browsers (e.g. Piggy Bank) that are designed specifically to utilize the portion of the Web that is "Semantic Web-compliant."
Meanwhile, in the background, semantic annotation will be slowly integrated into Web pages, programs, and services. As time progresses, users will eventually catch onto the "rave" that is the Semantic Web . . .
Saturday, January 05, 2008
E-Commerce 2.0
(1) Zopa looks at the credit scores of people looking to borrow and determines whether they're an A*, A, B, or C-rated borrower. If they're none of the those, then Zopa's not for them
(2) Leners make lending offers such as "I'd like to lend this much to A-rated borrowers for this long and at this time
(3) Borrowers review the rates offered to them and acept the ones they like. If they are dissatisfied with the offered rates on any particular day, they can come back on subsequent days to see if rates have changed
(4) To reduce any risk, Zopa spreads lender capital widely. A lender putting forth, for instance, 500 pounds or more would have his or her money across at least 50 borrowers
(5) Borrowers enter into legally binding contracts with their lenders
(6) Borrowers repay monthly by direct debit. If repayments are defaulted, a collections agency uses the same recovery process that the High Street banks use
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Mashups for '09
I've updated my last article with Mashups, Social Software, and Web 2.0: How Remixing Programming Code Has Changed The Web. In taking a look at mashups, I think libraries need to pay attention, as they open up virtual information services to a much larger audience.
When Times Are Tough . . .
And I`ve begun to experience this myself. Patrons are starting to use collections more, and realizing the financial pinch that the economy has given us. Fear not. The library isn`t going anywhere anytime soon.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Mashups for '09
I've recently written another entry on mashups, Mashups, Social Software, and Web 2.0
How Remixing Programming Code Has Changed The Web. The challenge with mashups is that it's still unfortunately a web programmer's tool. However, the next stage of the Web will be mashups. It's about opening data for others, and breaking down information silos.
11 Ways to the Library of 2012
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Happy Holidays and Seasons Greetings
I (as a librarian) found the article and the whole topic very important. I especially enjoyed the conclusion. You wrote that "Web 3.0 is about bringing the miscellaneous back together meaningfully after it's been fragmented into a billion pieces."I was wondering if in your opinion this means that the semantic web may turn a folksonomy into some kind of structured taxonomy. We all know the advantages and disadvantages of a folksonomy. Is it possible for web 3.0 to minimize those disadvantages and maybe even make good use out of them?
(3) Such a use of folksonomies could help overcome some of the inherent difficulties in ontology construction, thus potentially bridging Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web. By using folksonomies' collective categorization scheme as an initial knowledge base for constructing ontologies, the ontology author could then use the tagging distribution's most common tags as concepts, relations, or instances. Folksonomies do not a Semantic Web make -- but it's a good start.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Information Science As Web 3.0?
In his article Information Science, Tefko Saracevic makes a bold prediction:fame awaits the researcher(s) who devises a formal theoretical work, bolstered by experimental evidence, that connects the two largely separated clusters i.e. connecting basic phenomena (information seeking behaviour) in the retrieval world (information retrieval). A best seller awaits the author that produces an integrative text in information science. Information Science will not become a full-fledged discipline until the two ends are connected successfully.
As Saracevic puts it, IR is one of the most widely spread applications of any information system worldwide. So how come Information Science has yet to produce a Nobel Prize winner?
As I've opined before, LIS will play a prominent role in the next stage of the Web. So who's it gonna be?
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
The Semantic Solution - A Browser?
Semantic Web browser—an end user application that automatically locates metadata and assembles point-and-click interfaces from a combination of relevant information, ontological specifications, and presentation knowledge, all described in RDF and retrieved dynamically from the Semantic Web. With such a tool, naïve users can begin to discover, explore, and utilize Semantic Web data and services. Because data and services are accessed directly through a standalone client and not through a central point of access . . . . new content and services can be consumed as soon as they become available. In this way we take advantage of an important sociological force that encourages the production of new Semantic Web content by remaining faithful to the decentralized nature of the Web
I like this idea of a portal. To have everyone agree about how to implement W3C standards - RDF, SPARQL, OWL - is unrealistic. Not everyone will accept the extra work for no real sustainable incentive. That is perhaps why there is no current real invested interest by companies and private investors to channel funding to Semantic Web research. However, the Semantic Web portal is one method to combat the malaise. In many ways, it resembles the birth of Web 1.0, before Yahoo!'s remarkable directory and search engines. All we need is one Jim Clark and one Marc Andreeson, I guess.
(Maybe a librarian and an information scientist, or two?)
Friday, December 14, 2007
"Web 3.0" AND OR the "Semantic Web"
In medicine, there is virtually no discussion about web 3.0 (see this PubMed search for web 3.0 (zero results) and most of the discussion on the semantic web (see this PubMed search - ~100 results) is from the perspective of biology/ bioinformatics.
The dichotomy in the literature is both perplexing and unsurprising. On the one hand, semanticists are looking at a new intelligent web has 'added meaning' to documents, and machine interoperability. On the other, web 3.0 advocates use '3.0' to be trendy, hip or to market themselves or their websites. That said, I prefer the web 3.0 label to the semantic web because it follows web 2.0 and suggests continuity.
It is important that medical librarians -- all librarians for that matter -- join in (and even lead) the discourse, particularly since the Semantic Web & Web 3.0 will be based heavily on the principles of knowledge and information organization. Whereas Web 1.0 and 2.0 could not distinguish among Acetaminophen, Paracetamol, and Tylenol -- Web 3.0 will.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Google and End of Web 2.0
What Google scholar has done is bring scholars and academics onto the web for their work in a way that Google alone did not. This has led to a greater use of social software and the rise of Web 2.0. For all its benefits, Web 2.0 has given us extreme info-glut which, in turn, will make Web 3.0 (and the semantic web) necessary.
I agree. Google Scholar (and Google) are very much Web 2.0 products. As I had elaborated in my previous entry, AJAX (which is Web 2.0-based), produced many remarkable programs such as Gmail and Google Earth.
Was this destiny? Not really. As Yihong Ding proposes, Web 2.0 did not choose Google; rather, it was Google that had decided to follow Web 2.0. If Yahoo had only known about the politics of the Web a little earlier, it might have precluded Google. (But that's for historians to analyze). Yahoo! realized the potential of Web 2.0 too late; it purchased Flickr without really understanding how to fit it into Yahoo!'s Web 1.0 universe.
Back to Dean's point. Google's strength might ultimately lead to its own demise. The PageRank algorithm might have a drawback similar to Yahoo!'s once dominant directory. Just as Yahoo! failed to catch up with the explosion of the Web, Google's PageRank will slowly lose its dominance due to the explosion caused by Web 2.0. With richer semantics, Google might not be willing to drastically alter its algorithm since it is Google's bread-and-butter. So that is why Google and Web 2.0 might be feeling the weight of the future fall too heavily on their shoulders.
Sunday, December 09, 2007
AJAX'ing our way to Web 2.0
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Are You Ready For Library 3.0?
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
I See No Forests But the Trees . . .
The transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 is not supervised. W3C had not launched a special group for a plot of Web 2.0; and neither did Tim O'Reilly though he was one of the most insightful observers who caught and named this transition and one of the most anxious advocates of Web 2.0. In comparison, W3C did have launched a special group about Semantic Web that was engaged by hundreds of brilliant web researchers all over the world. The progress of WWW in the past several years, however, shows that the one lack of supervision (Web 2.0) advanced faster than the one with lots of supervision (Semantic Web). This phenomenon suggests the existence of web evolution laws that is objective to individual willingness.Even Tim O'Reilly pointed out that Web 2.0 largely came out of a conference when exhausted software engineers and computer programmers from the dot.com disaster saw common trends happening on the Web. Nothing is scripted in Web 2.0. Perhaps that's why there can never be a definitive agreement on what it constitutes. As I give instructional sessions and presentations of Web 2.0 tools, sometimes I wonder, how wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, and RSS feeds will look like two years from now. Will they be relevant? Or will they transmute into something entirely different? Or will we continue on as status quo?
Is Web 2.0 merely an interim to the next planned stage of the Web? Are we seeing trees, but missing the forest?
Friday, November 30, 2007
Digital Libraries in the Semantic Age
As Matthew proposes, by publishing controlled vocabularies in one place, which can then be accessed by all users across the Web, library catalogues can use the same Web-accessible vocabularies for cataloguing, marking up items with the most relevant terms for the domain of interest. Therefore, search engines can use the same vocabularies in their search to ensure that the most relevant items of information are returned.
The Semantic Web opens up the possibility to take such an approach. It offers open standards that can enable vendor-neutral solutions, with a useful flexibility (allowing structured and semi-structured data, formal and informal descriptions, and an open and extensible architecture) and it helps to support decentralized solutions where that is appropriate. In essence, RDF can be used as this common interchange for catalogue metadata and shared vocabulary, which can then be used by all libraries and search engines across the Web.
But in order to use the Semantic Web to its best effect, metadata needs to be published in RDF formats. There are several initiatives involved with defining metadata standards, and some of them are well known to librarians:
(1) Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
(2) MARC
(3) ONIX
(3) PRISM