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Although opinions about scope and scheduling tend to vary most experts agree that the transformation of “The Web” in to “The Semantic Web” is only a matter of time.
Based on the experience from the last major upheaval – the transition to “Web 2.0”, it’s safe to assume that regardless of the details, the transition will be a gradual one. This will be a process of Evolution rather than Revolution.

Change is coming (image by Maria Reyes-McDavis)

When will it begin?

One need only observe the steady increase over the past two years in the amount of enterprises and services focused on the Semantic Web space to realize that the process is already well under way.

Advances in web technology instigate social change

One of the lessons to be learned from the last transition the Web went through is that advances in web technology are powerful instigators for social adaptations and cultural evolution:

• Blogging
• Online social networking
• Crowd sourcing

These are just a few examples of some of the social adaptations that can be attributed to the transition to Web 2.0. It should be obvious that the transition to Semantic Web will have, indeed is having already, a similar impact. This post is an attempt to predict what impact the transition will have on our habits as consumers.

Buying online today

Our experiences as customers on today’s web are largely modeled on the offline commercial world and can be divided into two categories:

• Impulse buys
• Planned purchases

I’ve chosen to concentrate on planned purchases simply because impulse buys are by definition much harder to predict. To simplify things further I’d like to use an example from my own recent experiences:

Stroller Hunting 2.0

Shopping for a stroller isn't child's play... (image by Matt Ryall)

In order to understand how purchasing on the Semantic Web might differ from what we’re currently used to we first need to be aware of our current practices. As luck may have it my girlfriend and I are expecting our first child and since she’s started her third trimester about a month ago we’ve begun dedicating an increasing amount of time daily to hunting for the perfect baby stroller. By “perfect” I men the stroller best suited to our needs and circumstances. This is a textbook “planned purchase” and serves as a great case-study for this discussion so I’d like to take a closer look at the activities we’ve engaged in as part of our stroller hunt:

• Consulted with friends that made the same purchase recently.
• Discussed the purchase between us to define what we’re looking for
• Used Google and other resources to get a grasp of the stroller market.
• Compared stroller prices by using both price comparison sites and our own notes.
• Hunted for stroller bargains on Ebay, Amazon, and others online retailers.
• Posted “Stroller Wanted” ads on second hand and free-swap sites.

Upon analysis the following underlying commonalities can be identified as being shared between all the activities listed:

• They’re all motivated by a clearly defined and obvious need.
• The online activities required we visit specific web services.
• In order to really get the most value from our online activities multiple repetitions over a period of a few weeks were required.
• A certain portion of the time we invested turned out to be a dismal waste.
• All the activities we engaged in required us to aggregate and analyze the data.

The bottom line is that although the Web saved us the effort of getting out of the house to do our research, our online shopping experience turned out to be, perhaps unsurprisingly, not much more than a digitally enhanced bargain hunt. Moreover, when the value of the time my girlfriend and I invested in the purchase is added to the price we paid for the stroller we bought, our purchase,  regretfully, ceases to be anything that can even remotely be classified as a “bargain”…
Shopping on the Semantic Web may well be a very different experience.

The Semantic Web Stroller Hunt

A key element to remember about an ideal Semantic Web is that it’s a web of data where everything is perfectly defined and linked, and moreover all the data is  structured and accessible to computers. When all the data about everything is available online and accessible to computers shopping becomes a task requiring not much more than the indication of intent. The research, price comparisons, bidding all become completely automated.

Here’s a vision of what shopping for a stroller might look like on the Semantic Web:

Being pregnant has an effect on both my girlfriend’s, and my own online activities: Tagged pictures of my girlfriend’s pregnant belly are uploaded to Flickr for far away friends to see, gripes about morning sickness start appearing in our Tweets feeds and Facebook status alerts, we both begin subscribing to feeds from parenting sites, etc.

As our due date approaches the volume of these pregnancy related activities steadily increases.

Each one of our actions by itself is nearly inconsequential, but to all-aggregating and all-reasoning Semantic Web the cumulative effect of all of them combined means only one thing: we’re pregnant and ripe for pregnancy related content and… advertising.

Unlike the advertising we experience today the advertising my girlfriend and I are targeted with takes into account our unique needs and circumstances: We’re only offered stuff likely to be within our price range and supplied by vendors shipping to our region. Our online purchases influence the advertising we’re receiving as well: Ads for items we’ve already purchased are removed and replaced with ads for items that compliment and augment the stuff we’ve already bought.

The sum total of the experience is one in which instead of us having to hunt for baby items the Semantic Web makes sure they hunt for us…

Continue reading - Part 2

In the beginning Tim created the Web, and the Web was Semantic, and the Web was good…

I’ll go out on a limb and say that the Semantic Web precedes the World Wide Web.Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the Semantic Web is the original vision of the web, as can be seen in this diagram from the original proposal of the WWW created in 1989 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist credited with inventing it:

Tim Berners-Lee originally envisioned a semantic web

In hindsight we all know the early web didn’t quite evolve the way Berners-Lee envisioned it. Never one to dispair Sir Tim never abandoned his vision and continued to publish materials and make statements regrading the evolution of Semantic Web. In 1998 he started defining a road map for the semantic web and in 1999 he is quoted as saying:

“I have a dream for the Web in which computers become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”

His position as director of the World Wide Web Consortium, which oversees the Web’s development (a position he continues to hold to this day alongside many others no less prestigious) meant that Berners-Lee was uniquely positioned to help transform his vision into a reality.

The Semantic Web evolves

The early years of the millennium saw increased activity by W3C to promote and advance Semantic Web. After securing generous funding from the EU and other sources the W3C launched numerous workshops, events, and projects and provided backing for research in to the Semantic Web. The results of these efforts was a veritable smorgasbord of specifications and guidelines which were meant to be developed into the principal technologies of the Semantic Web. The current components are:

1. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) Core Model.
2. The RDF Schema language.
3. The Web Ontology language (OWL).
4. SPARQL – The standardized query language for RDF, that enables joining decentralized collections of RDF data.
5. The GRDDL Recommendation meant to create bridges between the RDF model and various XML formats, like XHTML.
6. POWDER, which is not a specification but rather a working group that develops technologies to find resource descriptions for specific resources on the Web that can be joined to other RDF data.
7. The SKOS model – an RDF vocabulary for expressing the basic structure and content of concept schemes (thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading lists, taxonomies, ‘folksonomies’, etc.).

The activities of all these groups is documented and as of 2006 can be viewed on the W3C’s aptly named “Semantic Web Activity News“.

The Semantic Web - the Layer cake as of 2007

The Semantic Web Paradigm

When faced with this impressive body of work, that spans nearly a decade, it is difficult to avoid asking one simple question:

How come after nearly a decade of work by some of brightest minds on the planet we, the countless masses who browse the web daily, are still largely unaware of the Semantic Web and have yet to experience the promise it holds?

The paradigm explained and resolved

The way I see it the evolution of a Semantic Web, even as defined by the work done under the auspices of the W3C,  is largely dependent on two factors:

Condition 1 – The existence of LARGE amounts of data online -For computers to ‘do the work for us’ and provide us with the boons that Berners-Lee envisioned for the semantic web, they must have the data required available to them. During most of the time that has passed since Berners-Lee published his vision, not only was the required data missing, it was also unclear who would collect, structure, validate and publish it.

Resolution – The explosion of the ‘Web 2.0′ phenomenon, starting with Wikis in 2000 and later evolving into the huge variety of social networking sites we enjoy today, resolved this issue. It was us, all of us, who through our massive engagement with countless dedicated social networks provided, and continue to provide, the Semantic Web with the data it requires to function.

Condition 2 – The structuring of data in formats that are understandable by machines - As the listing and diagram above clearly show much of the work the W3C has done is related to resolving this issue, however the simple fact is that is has largely been ignored by developers and commercial enterprises, and not without cause:

1. Many of the formats developed by the W3C are inconvenient to work with and implementing them is time consuming.
2. The commercial enterprises, web developers and the countless individuals involved in the day-to-day work of building and expanding the web, tend to resist formats dictated from above. The Web, by the very nature of the structure of the Internet as a net of connected yet independent computers, is an anarchic medium.
3. Despite all the time that has passed the W3C still has a great deal of work to do before the semantic web formats it advocates are structured and defined enough to be ready for wide scale commercial use.

Resolution – Nature and business both abhor a vacuum. While the W3C sit and deliberate, enterprise has de-facto provided the means for resolving the 2nd condition required for the Semantic Web via the APIs published by a rapidly growing number of web services. An API, by it’s very defintion, is a method for one web-service/computer to speak to another using predefined structured calls.

The logic driving this mushrooming of “data-givaways” is threefold:

1. APIs serve as splendid echo systems presenting an opportunity for an industry runner up to harrass the leader of the pack.
2. APIs allow web services that sell products to automate and thus greatly enhance their affiliate business.
3. There is a growing demand from developers for APIs and a demand is always met. Eventually…
4. Paid APIs present an opportunity for additional direct revenue.

What’s coming next?

By now (January 2009) product and download based web-services like Amazon and Itunes have made it clearly obvious that there is money to be made on the semantic web, and even though less product oriented services are still struggling to monetize the data they’ve aggregated, few would argue this value is worthless. It remains to be seen how user trends coupled with the laws of economics continue to shape the evolution of the web into the Semantic Web it was originally meant to be.

Keeping up with what interests you in a constantly expanding Web poses a serious question

The story of headup is the story of a bunch of people who came together to solve the following question:

“How do you know what you don’t know?”

The paradigm elaborated

The Internet is the greatest repository of information humanity has ever compiled, moreover it’s growing, changing and evolving constantly. As the Internet grows and evolves the following fundamental paradigm emerges:
How do you keep track of the things that are important and relevant to you in an environment that contains a practically infinite amount of constantly evolving information?

The Semantic Web

For the past few years the Internet’s leading thinkers, in view of the paradigm described above, have been predicting the emergence of a new iteration of the web – “The Semantic Web” – A World Wide Web of information linked together not so much by the predefined links we are familiar with today, but by an adaptable and scalable set of semantic relations. A web where information is served to you not according to the links you follow but according to its semantic context to whatever you are viewing.

headup is our attempt to realize this vision.
We hope you enjoy it…

For headup invitations contact me via @headup on twitter, or directly (miked[at]semantinet[dot]com)
: )

Cheers,
Mike
Creative Marketing – headup.com