Non-Technical Resources about the Semantic Web

I've been posting information-rich coments on other people's blogs. Why not post them on my own blog too? The cut/paste from various places caused the various font crazies in this post. I guess HTML isn't as transportable between applications as I had hoped.

• The primary source of info, more reliable than Wikipedia, about the Semantic Web (scroll down past the technical stuff)
  W3C Semantic Web http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
  
• That page has lots and lots of links. Suggest you start with the FAQ http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/SW-FAQ
• Recent interviews with Tim Berners-Lee.
  http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
  
  • “What is the future of the internet”, BBC Radio 4 Interview (9 July 2008).
  • “Sir Tim Berners-Lee Talks About the Semantic Web”, Transcript of the Podcast Interview with Paul Miller (February 2008); the sound version can also be accessed on-line.
  • The Semantic Web in Action, by Lee Feigenbaum, Ivan Herman, Tonya Hongsermeier, Eric Neumann, and Susie Stephens, Scientific American, 297(6), pp. 90-97, (December 2007). This is an early but good article, with case studies of commercial applications!
    
  • Interview with Tim Berners-Lee, Business Week, April 2007.
  • Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web, Video on MIT Technology Review, March 2007 (the video of the interview can also be accessed).
  • The Semantic Web Revisited, by Nigel Shadbolt, Tim Berners-Lee and Wendy Hall, IEEE Intelligent Systems 21(3) pp. 96-101, May/June 2006.
  • Le Web Sémantique: un interview avec Ivan Herman , by Xavier Borderie at Journal du Net, développeurs, June 2006. (Interview in French.)
  • The Semantic Web, Scientific American, May 2001, Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila.
    
  • (more archived material at the page)
    

I filtered for Cisco’s SP customers because I was posting a comment on a Cisco blog. Here are the 4 results when the W3C page is filtered by “telecom.” http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/ Select filters (right side) for IT, or multiple filters. Most use cases are for drug discovery because those are already very large and well annotated databases.

There are many, many special interest groups all over the place, ranging from very technical to almost fantasy-oriented. If you seek, you shall find!

Emergence of OpenSocial for the Social Web

Social networking is all the rage. I personally belong to more than 17 such networks ranging from the archaic but trail blazing Yahoo Groups to the latest darling, Facebook. Let me whine again: I need a competent, flexible, customizable content aggregator!!!!!!

It seems that social media is following the normal growth path for new markets and technologies.

• When a market or technology is new, players use 'walled gardens' to capture and defend market share. They use proprietary code, user interfaces, tools and of course content. An example is AOL during the first ten or so years of the public Internet.
  
• As more players enter the growing market, product features and interfaces become increasingly varied and tools become simultaneously more capable and more complex. Examples are different social networking platforms optimize on selected capabilities. Socialtext does wikis well; Jive differentiates itself with its forum capability; WebEx seems optimized for realtime meetings and communications...
  
• Despite a proliferation of ingenious dashboards, single (or limited multi-) function notifiers, and cross-platform tools, users want better productivity to manage identities, authentication, profiles, content and contacts.
• Users now want interoperability, ease of use, standardized interfaces and the transcendence of 'walled gardens.' They also want to be able to selectively share a body of content.
• Enter the "open" model. Open source, better DRM (digital rights management), not just interoperability, but overlap operability. We're seeing 'openess' emerge in the segments for routers, browsers and I hope soon, content.
  

Social Web Q&A with Google’s Kevin Marks is a good blog post that clearly outlines the Open Social initiative. It's a consortium of Internet players that intend to leverage existing code where possible, create open sourced tools where needed. They use the familiar 5 layer 'stack' as a conceptual model. The consortium is led by the most resource-rich player, Google. There's lots more detail and overall, is good news.

Read it, it's great.

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