The most exciting development in PR (and marketing) since the Cluetrain. The presentation introduces and explains the Semantic Web (aka Web 3.0) and identifies why this is of critical importance, now, to the influence disciplines. It concludes by outlining two Semantic Web ontologies required of the PR industry in its contribution to the growth and usefulness of Linked Data and calls for collaborative support in their development. Presented to members of the CIPR Social Media panel and other geeky types, London, 21st April 2010.

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

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

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

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

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

6. 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. Indeed, the Web becomes a universal medium for data, information and knowledge exchange. Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 6

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

8. The location of a document is specified with a Unique Resource Locator (URL). Eg, http://influencecrowd.com/philip_sheldrake/index.php The URL 21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 8 The file. The folder. 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. Stipulates the protocol for retrieving the resource.

9. But the URL is just one type of Unique Resource Indicator (URI), the other is a URN. A URI identifies something on the Internet A URL does so by addressing it (eg, where Stephen lives) A URN does so by unique, persistent and location-independent name (eg, “Stephen Waddington”) 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! The URI and URN 21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 9

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

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

12. 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. 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. Local and global 21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 12

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

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

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

16. A microformat is an alternative approach to semantic markup. 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. hCardand hCalendarare other microformats you may have come across. See http://evan.prodromou.name/RDFa_vs_microformats for a more detailed comparison of RDF and microformats. RDF and microformats 21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 16

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

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

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

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

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

22. I referred earlier to the Semantic Web’s full potential, and that full potential is described by a vision known as Linked Data. 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. The full potential 21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 22

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

24. 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. 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.” Source: http://linkeddata.org Linked Data 21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 24

25. Linked Data is made possible because the URIs referred to in the triple statements are described universally and ontologically. 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. 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. Ontologies 21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 25

26. Some popular Semantic Web ontologies include: The Dublin Core FOAF RSS VCard Creative Commons metadata 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). Ontologies /2 21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 26

27. 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: Agence France-Presse Associated Press dpa The Press Association Thomson Reuters It’s XML, and contains some RDF components. News from the IPTC 21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 27

28. XML (eXtensibleMarkup Language) is a standardised approach to encoding documents. When RDF is applied within a document, in a form called RDFa, this is an example of XML. 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. The benefits of the Semantic Web Linked Data cannot be achieved with XML alone. Where does XML fit in? 21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 28

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

36. Noun – the power or ability to affect someone’s beliefs or actions Verb – to exert the power, exercise the ability In other words… 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. Influence, a definition 21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 36

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

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

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

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

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

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

43. 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. To mark-up their contributions with their feelings, semantically. The Ontology For Feelings About Things informs the design and user experience of such apps and services. And then what? 21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 43

44. Properly applied, the Ontology For Feelings About Things should: Empower all social media participants to increase the utility of every social media contribution with very little additional effort 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 Feed into the Vendor Relationship Management Project. The Ontology For Feelings About Things 21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 44

45. Development of the ontologies is open, collaborative and subject to the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 License. Development of associated software is open and subject to GPLv3. 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! Get involved 21st April 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 45

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

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

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

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