Today's primitive prototypes show that a more intelligent Internet is still a long way off.
Many researchers and entrepreneurs are working on Internet-based knowledge-organizing technologies that stretch traditional definitions of the Web. Lately, some have been calling the technologies "Web 3.0." But really, they're closer to "Web 2.1."
Typically, the name Web 2.0 is used by computer programmers to refer to a combination of a) improved communication between people via social-networking technologies, b) improved communication between separate software applications--read "mashups"--via open Web standards for describing and accessing data, and c) improved Web interfaces that mimic the real-time responsiveness of desktop applications within a browser window.
To see how these ideas may evolve, and what may emerge after Web 2.0, one need only look to groups such as MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the World Wide Web Consortium, Amazon.com, and Google. All of these organizations are working for a smarter Web, and some of their prototype implementations are available on the Web for anyone to try. Many of these projects emphasize leveraging the human intelligence already embedded in the Web in the form of data, metadata, and links between data nodes. Others aim to recruit live humans and apply their intelligence to tasks computers can't handle. But none are ready for prime time.
The first category of projects is related to the Semantic Web, a vision for a smarter Web laid out in the late 1990s by World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee. The vision calls for enriching every piece of data on the Web with metadata conveying its meaning. In theory, this added context would help Web-based software applications use the data more appropriately.
My current Web calendar, for example, knows very little about me, except that I have appointments today at 8:30 A.M. and 4:00 P.M. A Semantic Web calendar would not only know my name, but would also have a store of standardized metadata about me, such as "lives in: Las Vegas," "born in: 1967," "likes to eat: Thai food," "belongs to: Stonewall Democrats," and "favorite TV show: Battlestar Galactica." It could then function much more like a human secretary. If I were trying to set up the next Stonewall Democrats meeting, it could sift through the calendars of other members and find a time when we're all free. Or if I asked the calendar to find me a companionable lunch date, it could scan public metadata about the friends, and friends of friends, in my social network, looking for someone who lives nearby, is of a similar age, and appreciates Asian food and sci-fi.
Alas, there's no such technology yet, partly because of the gargantuan effort that would be required to tag all the Web's data with metadata, and partly because there's no agreement on the right format for metadata itself. But several projects are moving in this direction, including FOAF, short for Friend of a Friend. FOAF files, first designed in 2000 by British software developers Libby Miller and Dan Brickley, are brief personal descriptions written in a standard computer language called the Resource Description Framework (RDF); they contain information such as a person's name, nicknames, e-mail address, homepage URL, and photo links, as well as the names of the people that person knows.
I generated my own FOAF file this week using the simple forms at a free site called Foaf-a-matic and uploaded it to my blog site. In theory, other people using FOAF-enabled search software such as FOAF Explorer, or "identity hub" websites such as People Aggregator, will now be able to find me more easily.
Eventually, more may be possible. For example, I could instantly create a network of friends on a new social-networking service simply by importing my FOAF file. But for now, there aren't a lot of ways to put your FOAF file to work.
Another project attempting to extract more meaning from the Web is Piggy Bank, a joint effort by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT Libraries, and the World Wide Web Consortium. Piggy Bank's goal is to lift chunks of important information in data-heavy websites from their surroundings, so that Web surfers can make use of these info chunks in new ways. For example, office address information extracted from LinkedIn, a professional networking site, could be fed into Google Maps, creating a map of my colleagues' places of business.
A new product lets workers combine simple bits of software to create business tools.
Radar Networks' free tool provides a smarter way to find information and increase productivity.
Programmers struggle to adjust to changes at the social-networking website.
Does anyone have any more detail about what to search for on addons.mozilla.org for a Piggy Bank Firefox extension? I tried "piggy bank", "screenscraper", "scraper", "mashup", among others, and didn't get anything.
Re: Piggy Bank Firefox Extension?
Google is your friend:
http://www.google.com/search?q=piggy%20bank%20firefox%20extension
Drop us a line at owonder.com/contact and we'll let you know when our FOAF/RDF powered service is ready to rock and roll.
We can add all of the metadata and/or tags we want to web resources but that does not mean that the "data about the data" honestly or accurately describes the resource. This is why Google does not place much importance on the metadata already contained in html document headers in terms of search ranking etc. Ensuring or verifying the validity of metadata would be a task equal to that of actually creating it but would have to be repeated continually.
Would Google + Facebook = Web 2.2 ??
Wade Roush writes that his "current Web calendar, for example, knows very little about me, except that I have appointments today at 8:30 A.M. and 4:00 P.M. A Semantic Web calendar would not only know my name, but would also have a store of standardized metadata about me, such as "lives in: Las Vegas," "born in: 1967," "likes to eat: Thai food," "belongs to: Stonewall Democrats," and "favorite TV show: Battlestar Galactica."
As I read this passage I looked up to the tabs along the top of my browser and noticed I still had FaceBook.com open ... and it occured to me that a similar set of factoids is already stored in my FaceBook profile (see http://humber.facebook.com/profile.php?id=507133544) ... To wit: "lives in: Mississauga," "born in: 1967," "likes to eat: Italian food," "favorite TV show: The Daily Show," and political views: "Libertarian".
More to the point FaceBook already allows for the type of social searching that Wade wishes his calendar was capable of. For instance with one click on my profile I was able to determine the names of 357 people within the Toronto sub grouping of FaceBook who share my interest in the band Rush.
As I thought about Wade's argument I started to imaging the fusion between FaceBook's profile comparison engine and Google Calendar. As I thought about it more it occurs to me that among the biggest deficiencies of the Google Apps suite is the lack of a FOAF (Friend of a Friend) capability. And yet in the tab adjacent to my Gmail window sits FaceBook ... almost screaming "Buy me! Merge my capabilities with yours!"
Piggy Bank is an interesting idea. But unless FireFox 2.1 ships with the extension preloaded it is little more then another geek tool.
I guess my point in posting this message is this: Google - consider buying FaceBook.com ... and to Mark Zuckerberg (founder of FaceBook) - The price you extract for FaceBook is just the first phase in your road to riches. Which begs the question Mark: Who can leverage (and monetize) the full power of FaceBook over the next 20 years - Google, Yahoo or Microsoft? Put another way: How much would $1 billion in Google stock be worth 20 years from now? How much would $1 billion in Yahoo stock be worth 20 years from now? How much would $1 billion in Microsoft stock be worth 20 years from now?
Web 2.0 deep into trusted environments..
Agree that web 2.0 has not made any impact yet on the Internet, but just happen to look at the more trusted corporate environments .
Web 2.0 technologies is being used extensively by knowledge management solution vendors like Kanisa (bought over long time market leaders in Service Resolution Management space i.e. Serviceware), not known as Knova software. With companies like Ontoprise and Cerebra raising huge VC funding and projecting web 2.0 as enabling EAI platform it sure has gret potential. Not to add that giants like Oracle have integrated Web 2.0 i.e. RDF capabilities and inferencing into Oracle 10g Spatial DB suites. Thus web 2.0 is slowly but surely making inroads into the industry. Not to mention that Google dabbles into Semantic web Look at
http://blogs.smh.com.au/mashup/archives//004396.html
Web 2.0 technologies would allow automatic creationg of meta-data from existing repositories with no meta-data .
Not sure how long it would somebody take the untrusted environment (heard of Semantic mediation to bride the meta-data gap between two representations of the same domain) of the internet to come up with a commercially viable solutions.....
But with such movement in the industry, Web 2.0 is sure to break in into Internet , sooner than later
Well-tagged content is available for medicine
For example, the National Library of Medicine has extensively tagged the scientific and medical literature. Some tags are redundant with information that can be gleaned from the title or abstract of the article. However, some tags capture meta-properties such as the intended audience of a paper that would be very hard to detect automatically.
Curbside.MD http://www.curbside.md is a medical search engine that makes extensive use of concept recognition and tagging.
Still no sign of semantic awareness
It is almost 2011 and still no sign of semantic awareness in the search engines. There have been some attempts in the recent past but nothing ground-breaking. I guess Social Search is looking more realistic at this point.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
On Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Feed
grausc01
12 Comments
FOAF: Are we ready?
I'm a young guy and am often ready to give out information about myself to a computer system in order for others to be able to find me. When I talk to my mother about what I do, she cries invasion of privacy and that all this data collecting is only leading to a surveillance state. Having worked with databases and surveys to reach people for marketing purposes I understand how useful it can be to have lots of exact information. But until people are willing to feel that nothing is private (except account numbers, SS#, etc), trying to link everyone together will be a long way off. I think it would be more important to work on FOAF-like meta data for products so that one location links together instruction manuals, customer service, updates, user reviews, known problems, and price comparisons all in one place; not like how we have websites with unique information which aren't interconnected in any manner to provide a comprehensive view of a product.
Reply
Guest (hosro59@comcast.net)
Re: FOAF: Are we ready?
We are already surveilled. Would metadata provide even richer
personal data files, as well as subject data we are interested in?
I would like that there be protection of personal data. But, there seems to be as much genious subverting any protection as there is developed.
Would a Web 2.0 or 3.0 be one that would have a means to include or exclude commercial data, ads?
Reply
lund1967
8 Comments
Re: FOAF: Are we ready?
I agree. Having all of that information in one convenient location is just asking to be hacked. And because the database does not store SSN's or credit card numbers, security may not be as high a priority as it ought. I don't think I would use anything like this.
Reply
rckthms62
1 Comment
Re: FOAF: Are we ready?
Privacy is a good point, and I am very worried about it, but we will have to find that balance between privacy and meta-data access. We do need browsers that can give us perceived and accurate preferences without us really asking for it. The internet is filled with information that is too “all-over-the-place”. We need a more logical system that can better understand search request. Mashup is one way to achieve this lack of relevant information gathering. New systems like the Chamberecommerce.com website is a great example in the Mashup concept. It takes everything you need to create an ecommerce website and places it all in one package, eliminating the need of outsourcing such services as PayPal functions. The future will be filled with meta-data and mashup products and functions.
Reply