When?

‘When...?’
Semantic Web technologies: where next...
Dan Brickley <http://danbri.org/>

Basket Cases
• Lessons (things that happened already)
Lesson
Trend
• Trends (things happening anyway)
• Requests (things to make the future sooner)
Request

Overview
• the Semantic Web project: history, hypertext & RDF
• Two ‘claims & hypertext’ scenarios
• Awkward Bit: learning our lessons
• play to our strengths: aggregation
• Trends in UI, search and services
• Big picture: Web as the new public record
Lesson Trend Request

1.
HISTORY
HYPERTEXT
& RDF

Geoffrey Sneddon, Tim Berners-Lee, William ‘When?’ Loughborough.
W3C Technical Plenary meeting, 2008, Cannes, France.

1968
Douglas Engelbart’s 1968 Demo

1989

1994
“To a computer, the Web is a flat, boring world, devoid of
meaning. This is a pity, as in fact documents on the Web
describe real objects and imaginary concepts, and give
particular relationships between them.”
“For example, a document might describe a person.
The title document to a house describes a house and
also the ownership relation with a person.”
Tim Berners-Lee \"W3 future directions\" keynote
1st World Wide Web Conference Geneva, May 1994
“Adding semantics to the Web involves two things: allowing
documents which have information in machine-readable
forms, and allowing links to be created with relationship
values. [this will] help us exploit the information to a greater
extent than our own reading.”

2008
The World:
!
The Web:
!

Pages make claims
ongoing.org: this is the OpenID for Tim. Tim knows Henry.
ongoing.org: Tim’s workplaceHomepage is http://sun.com/
Trend
bblfish.net: Henry workplaceHomepage is http://sun.com/
bblfish.net: Henry knows Tim. Henry’s phone number is, [...]

Strengths & Weaknesses
• Rich mixing, within and between documents
• any RDF data can use any RDF/OWL vocab
• can mention and describe anything related
• can omit information without breaking
• Things can be identified in multiple ways

A lot to be proud of...
• world-class, Web-scale data mixing environment
• current best bet for treating the Web as data
• optimised for massive decentralization
• somewhat chaotic, semi-structured, scruffy
• but grounded in formality and simplicity

2.
CLAIMS
&
HYPERTEXT

“Does the Web know what you’ve been doing?”
http://www.w3.org/People/Alumni
1. Express the basic claim in RDFa.
2. Hyperlinking for discovery from W3C homepage.
eg: <a href=”/People/Alumni”
Request rel=”xyz:alumniPage”>alumni</a>
Trust comes from linked information: claims in context.

Problem partition
• what is W3C’s homepage?
• we can check with Wikipedia/DBpedia
• what data/documents do they provide?
• via RDFa, RDF/XML, GRDDL, SPARQL
• what do they tell us? /People/Alumni etc.
• are they up to date? reliable? risky? wikis?
• a case-by-case decision

foaf:tipjar
Revisiting the “oh yeah?” problem with OpenID
authentication.

Trend
Trend

BBC Music: view source
Q: if we know their homepage and myspace page...
...how does that change what you’ll entrust to
Request
these OpenIDs if they log into your site?

Problem partition
• what is the Rumblestrips homepage?
• what is their myspace page?
• is the OpenID I’ve just seen, one of theirs?
• so that tipjar page linked from their FOAF, I
can trust it?
• ‘dunno mate’.
Request

3.
THE
AWKWARD
BIT
Lesson
Things that might’ve worked out better.

The art of compromise...
RDF: data spork?

Why would Mozilla
walk away?
Lesson Lesson Lesson

Redland+SQLLite+Mozilla = ?
Lesson
Lesson
Lesso

Lesson
Why would a startup with an RDF-
guru CTO not do RDF import?
(clue: wanted - stable, packaged pure-Ruby RDF toolkit)

Learning Lessons
Lesson
Read/write is harder than read-only aggregation.
Request
Tools. Packaging. Testing. QA. Documentation.
Request
Redland (RDF in C) is important.
Lesson
So are the scripting languages. All of them.
Request

Next time around...
• Drupal 7
• OpenOffice.org
• KDE Request
• XMP
• Yahoo! SearchMonkey, Google SGAPI, ....
• (not to mention widgets, oauth etc.)

Playing to our strengths?
Primarily, I think this means aggregation not
management of data. This follows from the necessarily
patchwork, open-world nature of our data model.
And of the Web.
RDF is beautiful for aggregation; challenging for data management.
GRDDL, SQL-to-SPARQL, RDFa, ... discuss...
Request

Strengths as weaknesses
• Rich mixing, within and between documents
• any RDF data can use any RDF/OWL vocab
• can mention and describe anything related
• can omit information without breaking
• Things can be identified in multiple ways

The strange appeal of the Semantic Web...
...being greater than the sum of your parts?

4.
TRENDS
IN
UI, SEARCH & SERVICES
Trend

What will ‘it’ be like?

An invisible Semantic Web...
Somewhat better search results.
Slightly smarter spam filters.
A calendar full of useful information.
Long-term archival tools.
Auto-maintained cross-references.
Relevant people grouped in addressbook.
Trend A quiet revolution?

What, no 3D flythrough?

Freebase Parallax
(from David Huynh, ex-SIMILE)
• From the skyscrapers in Hong Kong
• find the architects
• take the other buildings they made
• plot those on a map
Trend <http://code.google.com/p/freebase-parallax/>

• or take US presidents
• the ones who are republican
• their sons and daughters
• the schools they went to
• the inevitable map...
• or timeline, spreadsheet, blog post...
Trend

Sets and links
• The projects you work on
• The people who work on them too
• their latest public bookmarks
Trend

Two flavours
• skeptical: caring who claimed what
Request
• trusting: navigating flattened information Trend
• dataset selection & the “Oh yeah?” button
Request
Related UI we’re more familiar with:
Google earth layers, overlaying calendars, Photoshop layers...

More set-based navigation: gfacet
“which cities are the bands that
wrote this music from?”
Trend

Data :)
Trend

LOD! <http://linkeddata.org/> for details...
Trend

Search & Services
Yandex.ru, Aug 15th 2008:
“The FOAF (friend of a friend) standard makes blog
search or social network search deeper and more
accurate, in particular, it allows searching friend feeds and
user profiles”
“the largest blog services in the Russian internet including
Livejournal.com, Liveinternet.ru and Blogs.Mail.ru,
represent user profiles in FOAF.”
Trend & Sindice, Garlik Qdos, Falcons, ...

Is Google the next Google?
“The Social Graph API makes information about the public
connections between people on the web more easily available.”
“...indexes the public Web for XHTML Friends Network (XFN),
Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup and other publicly declared
connections. By supporting open Web standards for describing
connections between people, web sites can add to the social
infrastructure of the web.”
Trend

SGAPI: Microformats & FOAF/RDF
Claim graph analytics:
epeus.blogspot.com: “kevinmarks.com is me!”
Request
kevinmarks.com: “epeus.blogspot.com is me!”
danbri.org: Kevin Marks’ site is http://kevinmarks.com/
danbri.org: his foaf:workplaceHomepage is http://google.com/

5.
THE
NEW
PUBLIC
RECORD

Who, what, where and when, in...
• Government • Healthcare
• Journalism • Libraries
• Science • Arts
• Law • History
• Trade • Museums
• Research • Education
• Agriculture • Archives...
an endless list, infinitely interconnected...

Already happening
• The Web is becoming our common public record
• the Semantic Web’s mission is to defragment it
Aside: privacy by obscurity is going away fast. Facebook & ‘social
graph’ tools are educating a generation about “public”...

Libraries revisited: FRBR
Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records
Trend
Request

FRBR:
Trend
Credit: William Denton <://www.miskatonic.org/library/2008ola/>
Request

Libraries revisited, ...
☑Catalogues.
☑Name authority files.
☑Thesauri.
☐ Classification schemes.
Trend
Keep an eye on: http://openlibrary.org/
Request

Douglas Engelbart’s 1968 Demo

Trend

Re-use
Re-cycle
Reclaim
Repair
Anything but
seamless.

Recap

When you’re a data mixing system, be a data mixing system.
Lesson
There is plenty more code to write, test and document.
Lesson
Learning from non-‘true believer’ users will speed up adoption.
Lesson
Stating the obvious?

Trend
Web increasingly machine-readable -
XML, JSON, MFs, SQL, & -yes- RDF/OWL.
µf
Pages make claims.
RDF UI ideas are maturing.
Massive datasets are being linked.
Integration here plays to our strengths...

Request
1. Get the missing code written. Tested. Packaged. Please!
2. Think about the Web as a linked information system.
3. ...and the Semantic Web as a project not a thing.

Questions?