Welcome to The most exciting
development in pr since the cluetrain.PROBABLY.well maybe.<br />1<br />

PR &The semantic webaka “Web
3.0”<br />Philip Sheldrake<br />Influence Crowd LLP<br />www.influencecrowd.com<br />LinkedIn /in/philipsheldrake<br />@sheldrake<br />2<br />A presentation to members of the CIPR SM Panel and other geeks. London, 21st April 2010.<br />

Introduction to the Semantic Web<br
/>LinkedData<br />XML and XPRL<br />The ontologies<br />How to get involved<br />Reading, collaboration, conversation.<br />This presentation includes:<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />3<br />

The Semantic Web<br />4<br />21st
April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />

Whilst there is some confusion
over the term, most people use “Web 3.0” to refer to the Semantic Web. I do.<br />Either way, the label is a bit of a distraction, but marketers love it, so what can I say!<br />I use the terms interchangeably here.<br />Web 3.0<br />5<br />

If Web 2.0 was all
about (user generated) content and community participation, Web 3.0 is about the Web itself understanding the meaning of all the content and participation.<br />Indeed, the Web becomes a universal medium for data, information and knowledge exchange.<br />Web 2.0 and Web 3.0<br />6<br />

You can consider the development
of the current Web (pre-Web 3.0) as having been informed by a document metaphor:<br />Files, desktop, documents<br />Open, read, close<br />Everything has a location (like files in a filing cabinet).<br />The document metaphor<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />7<br />

The location of a document
is specified with a Unique Resource Locator (URL).<br />Eg, http://influencecrowd.com/philip_sheldrake/index.php<br />The URL<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />8<br />The file.<br />The folder.<br />The domain name that relates to an IP address of a server (via a domain name server (DNS)), in this case right now a shared server at 69.89.31.175.<br />Stipulates the protocol for retrieving the resource.<br />

But the URL is just
one type of Unique Resource Indicator (URI), the other is a URN.<br />A URI identifies something on the Internet<br />A URL does so by addressing it (eg, where Stephen lives)<br />A URN does so by unique, persistent and location-independent name (eg, “Stephen Waddington”)<br />Although of course the one and only Stephen Waddington may not actually be the only, so [firstname, lastname] does not make for a good URN schema!<br />The URI and URN<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />9<br />

A hypothesis of the Semantic
Web is that meaning can be conveyed via expressions known as triples:<br />Triples<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />10<br />

Resource Description Framework (RDF) is
a language at the heart of the Semantic Web for expressing data models using statements expressed as triples.<br />RDFa is an approach to RDF that adds the information to normal Web pages for subsequent extraction by RDF tools.<br />And the secret sauce?... to avoid ambiguities, each and every subject, predicate and object of a triple can be expressed with a URI.<br />RDF, RDFa, Triples and URIs<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />11<br />

We could define all three
of these locally, but all three are likely to be referred to elsewhere too, and that’s where the power of the Semantic Web starts to kick in.<br />Eg, this “Philip Sheldrake” may be defined uniquely with ref to: http://sheldrake.myopenid.comor http://philipsheldrake.com or http://www.google.com/profiles/philip.sheldrake.<br />Local and global<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />12<br />

But what about the concept
of “knows”… how might that be defined globally and uniquely?<br />Well FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects.<br />To invoke reference to the FOAF ontology we write:<br /><rdf:RDFxmlns:foaf=“http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/”<br />FOAF<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />13<br />

At that URI we will
find a definition of “knows”:<br />http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_knows<br />So now, when we express a statement as a triple like<br />Subject - http://philipsheldrake.com<br />Predicate - foaf:knows<br />Object - http://searls.com<br />there is no ambiguity as to what it means.<br />Note: this format is for explanation purposes only and does not constitute sound syntax!<br />FOAF /2<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />14<br />

How about?!<br />http://xkcd.com/stickman foaf:complicated http://xkcd.com/stickwoman<br
/>Simple complicated<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />15<br />http://xkcd.com/355<br />

A microformat is an alternative
approach to semantic markup.<br />The eXtensible Friends Network (XFN) is the microformat most similar to FOAF for example. XFN is used to express how one blogger is related to another whose blog they list in their blogroll.<br />hCardand hCalendarare other microformats you may have come across.<br />See http://evan.prodromou.name/RDFa_vs_microformats for a more detailed comparison of RDF and microformats.<br />RDF and microformats<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />16<br />

I endorse the RDF approach
for several reasons, the most important ones here being:<br />It comes under the purview of the W3C<br />Microformats cannot scale to achieve the Semantic Web’s full potential.<br />RDF is being used today by:<br />dbpedia – a project to represent Wikipedia content in RDF<br />data.gov.uk – making the UK’s data mashable!<br />Amazon.com – to mark up its and its partners’ products.<br />RDF is the future<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />17<br />

21st April 2010 / Influence
Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />18<br />Wake up!<br />Wake up at the back!<br />Google’s coming next!<br />http://www.flickr.com/photos/morberg/3146874095<br />Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic<br />

GoodRelations is the name of
an ontology for ecommerce.<br />Jay Myers, Lead Web Development Engineer for Best Buy, reported that adding GoodRelations and RDFa:<br />Improved the rank of the respective pages in Google tremendously<br />Increased traffic on the BestBuy stores pages by 30%.<br />Search Engine Strategies 2009 conference, Chicago.<br />http://ebusiness-unibw.org/pipermail/goodrelations/2009-December/000152.html<br />Google loves RDF<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />19<br />

Google reads semantically marked up
content and, as of May 2009, uses it to create “rich snippets” it in its search results. Eg,<br />http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html<br />Google’s Rich Snippets<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />20<br />This “rich snippet” is possible only because Pocket-lint marks its content up semantically and to a standard recognised by Google.<br />

Yahoo!’s SearchMonkey and Microsoft Bing’sPowerset
team are heavily invested in RDF too.<br />There will be more news on this front this year from all three big search providers, and Wolfram|Alpha of course.<br />Yahoo! and Bing<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />21<br />

I referred earlier to the
Semantic Web’s full potential, and that full potential is described by a vision known as Linked Data.<br />The following diagram of Linked Data, and ones like it, are as important to PR and marketing professionals as any Web 2.0 illustration you will have seen bandied around over the years.<br />The full potential<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />22<br />

LinkedData image<br />21st April 2010
/ Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />23<br />Chris Bizerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lod-datasets_2009-07-14_colored.png<br />Creative CommonsAttribution-ShareAlike 3.0<br />

Linked Data is about using
the Web to connect related data that wasn't previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods.<br />More specifically, Wikipedia defines Linked Data as "a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF.”<br />Source: http://linkeddata.org<br />Linked Data<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />24<br />

Linked Data is made possible
because the URIs referred to in the triple statements are described universally and ontologically.<br />An ontology is a way to describe subjects, objects and predicates. It is an expression of a view of the world; a domain’s objects and concepts and their properties and relations.<br />Useful ontologies (ie, ones that can form building blocks of the Semantic Web Linked Data) are described in a formal ontological language. The one endorsed by W3C is the Web Ontology Language, or OWL for short.<br />Ontologies<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />25<br />

Some popular Semantic Web ontologies
include:<br />The Dublin Core<br />FOAF<br />RSS<br />VCard<br />Creative Commons metadata<br />There are no ontologies yet, to my knowledge, emanating from or working within the field of public relations specifically (except the product review ontology perhaps).<br />Ontologies /2<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />26<br />

The International Press Telecommunications Council
announced the official launch and widespread adoption of its G2 family of news exchange standards earlier this month, supported by:<br />Agence France-Presse<br />Associated Press<br />dpa<br />The Press Association<br />Thomson Reuters<br />It’s XML, and contains some RDF components.<br />News from the IPTC<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />27<br />

XML (eXtensibleMarkup Language) is a
standardised approach to encoding documents.<br />When RDF is applied within a document, in a form called RDFa, this is an example of XML.<br />But XML is not RDF, so whilst prior work informing a standardised XML schema can be used to inform the design of an ontology, it is not ready as-is.<br />The benefits of the Semantic Web Linked Data cannot be achieved with XML alone.<br />Where does XML fit in?<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />28<br />

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Semantic-web-stack.png<br />The Semantic Web stack<br
/>21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />29<br />

XPRL was a valiant effort
to design an XML schema for common PR processes.<br />The first release aimed to encode the processes of:<br />Encapsulating a press release<br />Briefing a media reporting agency to report on media coverage<br />Reporting media coverage (clipping reports).<br />What happened to XPRL?<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />30<br />

In my opinion, XPRL was
not adopted for the following reasons:<br />An XML approach is more valuable the higher the level of automation and data interchange – yet PR practice has historically very low levels<br />XML of itself does not possess the compelling, can’t-be-ignored, synergistic potential of RDF<br />The PR profession is not renowned for being the most technically savvy to date.<br />In conclusion, the PR industry simply could not see its value.<br />What happened to XPRL? /2<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />31<br />

In my opinion, PR and
associated disciplines should be gearing up for Web 3.0 now because:<br />The level of automation and data interchange is growing rapidly, particularly with the massive growth of:<br />Web analytics<br />Retail analytics<br />Search engine optimisation<br />Search engine marketing<br />Social Web analytics<br />and the nascent social relationship management (SRM) and “ERPing” of the influence (marketing and PR) processes.<br />What’s changed?<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />32<br />

In my opinion, PR and
associated disciplines should be gearing up for Web 3.0 now because (continued):<br />RDF’s synergistic potential cannot be ignored during the influence processes<br />It is happening now, and in ways no well-founded PR / influence campaign can ignore (eg, Google ranking!)<br />It doesn’t matter if today’s PR practitioner isn’t technically savvy – they will become ‘admin’ or be replaced by those who are.<br />I refer to the latter as the rise of the Influence Professional and the Chief Influence Officer; see my presentation on “Influence”.<br />What’s changed? /2<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />33<br />

21st April 2010 / Influence
Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />34<br />Influence<br />Influence<br />http://www.flickr.com/photos/philip_sheldrake/2642725725<br />

“Influence” is the name I
use for all the disciplines, including PR, aimed at monitoring and improving the Six Flows of Influence™.<br />Influence<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />35<br />

Noun – the power or
ability to affect someone’s beliefs or actions<br />Verb – to exert the power, exercise the ability<br />In other words…<br />You have been influenced when you think in a way you wouldn’t otherwise have thought, or when you do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done. <br />Influence, a definition<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />36<br />

21st April 2010 / Influence
Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />37<br />Influence<br />Ontologies<br />http://www.flickr.com/photos/philip_sheldrake/2772635450<br />

I contend that the PR
and the other influence disciplines need at least two ontologies:<br />One for our world<br />One for the world out there<br />So what ontologies do we need?<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />38<br />

Trends informing the design of
a PR Ontology, an ontology for the influence disciplines:<br />Convergence of marketing and PR teams<br />The increasing application of IT<br />The “ERPing” of marketing and PR<br />Greater demand for board level accountability<br />The increasing need for campaign adaptability / nimbleness<br />The need for campaigns to be more responsive<br />The need for all organisations to be more responsive<br />Team structure (esp. agency) adaptability – plug’n’play.<br />The ontology for our world<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />39<br />

Perhaps trying to answer the
following questions will help inform the design of the PR Ontology:<br />What processes could be standardised because there is no room left for competitive advantage beyond workforce efficiency in their execution?<br />What can we learn from disciplines in which IT and such semantic approaches have become ingrained earlier?<br />How do we connect our data, information and knowledge into the wider organisation’s / client’s other operational data, information and knowledge?<br />What is the atom of influence?<br />The ontology for our world /2<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />40<br />

Following on from the assertion
in my previous presentation that the influence disciplines should pursue an influence-centric rather than influencer-centric approach…<br />Helping our publics, our stakeholders better express and communicate their thoughts and actions can only benefit all parties.<br />The ontology for the world out there<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />41<br />

Our profession needs to develop…<br
/>The Ontology For Feelings About Things.<br />This may well be informed by extant work by Linda Childers Hon, James E. Grunig, Bruning and Ledingham, and many others I’m sure.<br />http://influencescorecard.wikispaces.com/The+original+email+about+the+ontology<br />http://influencescorecard.wikispaces.com/The+ontology+for+feelings+about+things<br />http://influencescorecard.wikispaces.com/Classes+and+properties+for+input+into+the+ontology+design<br />The ontology for the world out there /2<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />42<br />

For the WWW's social media
participants to be part of Web 3.0 as well as Web 2.0, they need a set of easy-to-understand and easy-to-use extensions / add-ons / plugins / apps to augment their current applications and services.<br />To mark-up their contributions with their feelings, semantically.<br />The Ontology For Feelings About Things informs the design and user experience of such apps and services.<br />And then what?<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />43<br />

Properly applied, the Ontology For
Feelings About Things should:<br />Empower all social media participants to increase the utility of every social media contribution with very little additional effort<br />Allow brands to gain a better understanding of their stakeholders' (incl. customers' and prospects') points of view courtesy of their analytics services, to get into the conversation and to improve their products and services<br />Feed into the Vendor Relationship Management Project.<br />The Ontology For Feelings About Things<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />44<br />

Development of the ontologies is
open, collaborative and subject to the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 License.<br />Development of associated software is open and subject to GPLv3.<br />I'm delighted thatWooThemes‘ AdriaanPienaar is helping lead this side of things. If you don't know these guys, you might see that they come second only to wordpress.org in Google's search results for "Wordpress themes”. They are simply a very talented bunch!<br />Get involved<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />45<br />

Just drop in and register
at the wiki, or contact Philip @sheldrake or philip@influencecrowd.com.<br />Get in touch<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />46<br />

Thanks to Steve Waddington and
Speed Communications for hosting this event.<br />@wadds / www.speedcommunications.com<br />Thanks<br />47<br />

With the current paucity of
“meaning”, forgive me for helping search engines help others find this presentation:<br />Marketing and Web 3.0<br />Marketing and the Semantic Web<br />Marketing and Linked Data<br />Advertising and Web 3.0<br />Advertising and the Semantic Web<br />Advertising and Linked Data<br />Public relations and Web 3.0<br />Public relations and the Semantic Web<br />Public relations and Linked Data<br />Online PR and Digital PR<br />Optimisation slide<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />48<br />

http://semanticweb.org<br />http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web<br />http://linkeddata.org<br />http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_data<br />http://influencescorecard.wikispaces.com
- the wiki for the emergence of an overarching methodology<br />http://www.philipsheldrake.me.uk - my blog<br />CIPR Social Media group: #ciprsm / http://twitter.com/sheldrake/cipr-digital-group<br />Reading, collaboration, conversation<br />21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales<br />49<br />