Reading "Ambient Findability", I came across Peter Morville's discussion of the Semantic Web, which references Shirky's lame criticism of it ("The Semantic Web is a machine for creating syllogisms"). He also quotes David Weinberger: I fear that the Semantic Web will go the way of SGML and for basically the same reason: normalization of metadata works real well in confined applications where the payoff is high, control is centralized and discipline can be enforced. In other words: not the Web. Reading such comments confounds me, since they've got it *exactly* wrong. The Semantic Web approach is LOOSE, not normalized. The...

I'm amazed now thinking I've been back from Florida three weeks. Amazed at both how long and how short it seems, which usually means some life's been lived, which couldn't be truer for me these last weeks. Someday I'll write about our trials down in Florida with adoption and bureaucrats. I'll write when I've had more reflection and walkaway time. It's an amazing story. I'll also write about little Isabel and I finally driving into Bethlehem during Moravian Vespers, which my wife conducts, and Isabel spending her first hour in town listening to Paula's choir and watching handmade Christmas candles...

Since my last post, I've opened my editor many times, wanting to write, but words just wouldn't arrive, though not for lack of subject matter. When life gets too real to merely chat about, I find it harder and harder to write. In September, on the Autumnal Equinox, Paula and I got a call about a woman from Florida who was pregnant. Two weeks later, we learned she'd picked us to raise her baby. We also learned of another woman who'd picked us, who was pregnant with twin girls. Our counselor gave us a rare and flabbergasting choice: twins or...

Just now I logged onto the semantic web IRC chat channel after many months away and immediately saw: <libby> teefal! long time no see Having met Libby a few times on various islands in the Atlantic, I know her as very friendly, so it doesn't surprise me that she'd say hi so quickly. What surprised me is how welcomed I felt by it. This got me thinking about the humanness that interconnects our fragile web communities. Scrolling through nicknames on #swig, I was able to quickly recall faces, voices, and conversations. The fact that these people live all over the...

After long and stressful projects, I usually allow myself a period of "lateral drift" where I spend time learning nifty things I have no time for. After a sustained period of MUST DO, MUST DO, MUST DO ... I relax with the optional, slowly sneaking up on my responsibilities again. It's my way of combatting burnout, and discovering new directions. My last period of lateral drift was the fall of 2003, wherein I found the Semantic Web and started this blog. This current drifting time lasted two months, wherein I revisited at length the state of Web standards, and spent...

In the early days of this blog, I talked about improving the semweb's "whirlpool rap", stressing that we need a clearer way to talk about it to non-technical types. Since then, I've learned there's an even greater challenge: convincing developers that RDF and the Semantic Web are genuinely worth the training time required before they pigeonhole it and write it off as hype. Choosing tech is critical for software developers and managers. In the last twenty-four years of wading through languages, API's, platforms, and design approaches, I've learned to bet on established winners because there's no more costly mistake than...

I started this blog a year ago today. My original goal was to write once a day about the Semantic Web and its social implications: ...which is why we need Round Two: the annotated, interconnected, Web. This new organic, evolving, maintainable, improvement will do more than simply increase the accuracy of our Google searches. It'll help real people understand and visualize interconnection, which in my opinion will alter our society profoundly for the better. I kept up with the once-a-day pace for two months, writing mostly about semweb topics, before getting distracted by the demands of our in-house Immuexa project,...

A year ago this morning, I watched my first Florida sunrise as I left behind Florida and (and ISWC) to start a new chapter in my life: This morning, this sunrise, was a beginning not an ending. From here forward, I realize the dream. On the plane home, I worked out the details of my decision. Immuexa, our six year old software & website service business would need to close to new clients to focus on internal product development (which we did). I'd have to learn more about the semantic web, writing down what I found in a blog (which...

Riding now on the train to Dublin, watching the Irish countryside with its very green fields and patchwork stone walls, I’m finally rested enough to properly reflect on my week in Ireland and the crazy month before. For a small Pennsylvania company to fly to Ireland, there best be a good reason for it. Our primary goal was to create PhotoBingo, then play a game at FOAF Galway, giving nifty shirts to all involved. Beyond this, our goal was useful conversation: Q&A on other efforts, breakout session brainstorming, table chat on shared topics, and feedback on our own products. Though...

We've been extra busy here at Immuexa, trying to get PhotoBingo up and running in time for FOAF Galway. I've been neglecting my blog, which is a sure sign that I'm getting real work done :) Last night I finished the jersey we'll be giving away to people who play the first game, which will be named "1st FOAF Bingo". We'll start it before the workshop and let it run a while after that, so people have time to waste time when they get back home. Here's the bingo jersey, front and back:     The illustrations were done just for...

Today Immuexa agreed to sponsor the First Workshop on FOAF, Social Networking, and the Semantic Web, being held in Galway, Ireland, in early September. We're making "FOAF Bingo", a website game that hopefully will get people uploading photos and annotating using FOAF, much in the same spirit as w3photo.org, only in a somewhat more arbitrary and ridiculous way. I'll write more about it in the next post. Tonight, my mind's on Ireland, having never been there myself. I'm roughly half-Irish, given that my father's mother (King) and my mother's father (Brady) were Irish. My grandma was born and raised there,...

Everything needs to work with everything else. Can we at least agree on this? There's nothing worse than using a piece of software only to regret it later because it won't play nice with others. Even with things as simple as contacts and calendars, it's incredible how little we can interoperate. How many of us keep our old contact manager around because it does certain things better than our new one, like printing labels or envelopes? Why can't we use both programs simultaneously without worrying about file formats or import/export? Just how many people start completely over rather than figure...

Last night I ate dinner at the Carnegie Deli with Nick Gibbins, Stephen Harris, Dave Becket, Libby Miller, Jim Hendler, and several others I know only by IRC nickname. We then chatted till 11pm in the hotel bar about a great many semweb things. I'm exhausted! This morning I packed up and checked out with plenty of time to make my bus, then talked for an hour in the lobby with Mor Naaman from Stanford, causing me to miss my bus by 8 minutes. My penance was sitting two hours on the floor in Port Authority, which is its own...

Waking after what seemed like mere minutes of sleep, I dressed in a daze and wandered down to the photo annotation session of Developer's Day. Greg Elin, Libby Miller, and Mor Naaman gave talks while I played a bit with Tidepool, trying to get it behave. After I made a point regarding privacy at the show, mentioning that we were working on a photo annotation program, Greg asked if I'd like to show it. "Sure", I said without much thought as I wandered up to plug in my Powerbook into the overhead projector. I said a few things about it,...

A line that stood out for me at yesterday's Tim Berners-Lee talk was "Start off with islands and stitch them together." He said this in answer to a question regarding ontology standardization. Later as I talked to people about it, I was surprised at how controversial an opinion it was. Many thought (or knew people who thought) that modeling efforts should be less haphazard, that we should we aim at a kind of "imperial ontology" and instill a sense of responsible conformity in those around us. One guy even said, when confronted with some "fringe attributes" that people may consider,...

Just got back from two meals at the Zen Palace, first with semweb photo folks such as Jennifer Golbeck, Ben Shneiderman, Nick Gibbins, and Stephen Harris, then as we were leaving, I ran into Libby Miller, Dave Beckett, Dave Reynolds, etc, so stayed for their meal. Five hours of dinner talk. Storymill.net will have to wait. :)...

An hour away from the start of www2004, I'm in my hotel room at the Sheraton, listening to the coffee brew and my wife Paula prepare for her bus trip back to Pennsylvania. We've been here three days, starting with an Ani Difranco concert in Carnegie Hall on Saturday, then roaming round Greenwich Village, South Street Seaport, and lower Manhattan on Sunday, then sleep and work on Monday, topped off with Times Square and Super Size Me, a film that cured me of fast food forever. Now Paula's leaving, which is making me sad. I wish she were staying the...

My wife plays Solitaire incessantly. She's got a PhD and a professor's schedule, but nearly every time I look over at her laptop, she's reflexively sorting cards into piles, playing Freecell or some variation. She tells me it relaxes her, which seems reasonable enough, even if my idea of relaxing involves a dark room and a soft pillow. She's not alone. Solitaire is easily the most popular computer program of all time. More popular than email or web browsing, Solitaire is often the first program people use. I used it to teach my mom how to use a mouse. It's...

In the second paragraph of Weaving the Web, Tim Berners-Lee writes of the Web as something that "leaves the entirety of our previous ways of working as just one tool among many." I'm sure most people keep right on reading without a second thought about that sentence, as the line resembles much of the overwrought journalistic hyperbole aimed at the Web. When I read it today though, the line stopped me cold. He means exactly what he wrote, and he can back it up. Outstanding. With the WWW2004 show coming next week, I've been trying to gather my thoughts after...

Yesterday, I wrote about the need for new user interface metaphors, so more people can better visualize interconnectedness. There are several examples of the semantic graph approach, particularly the ThinkMap prototypes (such as the Visual Thesaurus), the TouchGraph browsers, and the IdeaGraph effort. Even demos such as foafcorp are a step in the right direction, but they're just a step. The goal, I think, is to create a semantic browser similiar to these efforts, but one that non-technical people can use immediately without much orientation. I'm hoping there's a point where interconnected semantic graph navigation becomes extremely usable, where exploration...

I lived in Florida for a few years in my mid-twenties in a town called Bonita Springs, between Naples and Fort Myers, just south of Sanibel. It's where I started my first business in 1989, hoping to create something like the web. It's where I first faced the business world as an adult, where I took my first "slings and arrows", where I did a lot of growing up. After I left Florida for Pennsylvania, my parents moved to Bonita permanently. I went back to visit at least once a year for the next eleven years. A lot of life...

Today after terrific talks with Dan Brickley and Libby Miller, I read up on the W3C to see just why Immuexa should consider joining. I found their Seven Points page, which I recommend you run off and read right now. Pretty good, yes? This is the kind of language I respond to: simple, direct, inspiring. The friendly drawings help too. I've been visiting the W3C site for years to read up on standards, but it wasn't until I read this page that I really grokked their purpose. If I were them, I'd take it a step further and make something...

Probably the most used RDF schema, besides rdf and rdfs, is Dublin Core, a metadata standard established to describe documents. The first thing you should know about Dublin Core is that it has nothing to do with James Joyce or the city in Ireland. This Dublin is in Ohio, which is where some semweb pioneers met in March 1995 to establish the standard. The next thing you should know about Dubin Core is that it's simple and useful. How so? Well, Dublin Core is a set of fifteen essential things people want to know about a document: its title, its...

To prep for my upcoming talk with Dan Brickley, father of FOAF, I figured I'd indulge myself in some wild and irreverant conjecture before hunkering down to a more concise and clear FOAF Tangle Yarn. Imagine someone casts a spell, and we all woke up tomorrow without fear of universal IDs. Let's say Dan bought the domain "humanity.org" and established a worldwide FOAF repository. To make this really wacky, let's say someone invented a cheap way to determine a unique hash ID from our personal genetic code. I can see it now: I walk into my local pharmacy, drop a...

The next year will be a big one, no doubt. In 2004, we'll probably hear the first mentions of "Semantic Web" on mainstream media. Somebody's gonna release that category-defining application that people can point to and say, "That's what I'm talking about! That's the Semantic Web!" Blogs will get even more of our mindshare, especially as we get closer to the American presidential election. I fully expect blog rates to soar, both readers and writers. I can't yet tell if something will shake the "power law" fix of the new blogarati class. If anything, it'll be due to mega-corp marketing...

Why is RDF worth our time? My short answer is "because RDF is loose, but not too loose." RDF has enough order to do useful things, but doesn't require us to rewire the world first. If tech were tunes, RDF would be a jazz trio, not a Bach fugue. It lets players who hardly know each other improvise, yet it holds things together beautifully: the quintessential jam. In this way, RDF is much like the current Web. RDF shares many of the benefits that made the first Web a success. As Dave Beckett said, "RDF allows loose collaboration with little...

Last time I talked about "triples", which are the elementary nugget in RDF. What's a triple? Have a look: <rdf:Description rdf:about='http://bigfractaltangle.com' dc:title='Big Fractal Tangle' /> This triple is saying, "The resource 'http://bigfractaltangle.com' has the title 'Big Fractal Tangle." It's a single fact, expressed as an RDF statement, or triple. The three parts that make it a triple are: resource: http://bigfractaltangle.com predicate: dc:title object: Big Fractal Tangle Every RDF statement has a resource, a predicate, and an object. To see it another way, we can take the Grammar Rock approach: each sentence has a subject and a predicate. The subject is...

Now that you've seen some actual RDF, we can take a step back to put things in context. RDF is essentially a data model -- a way of describing data, or in this case, metadata. There's plenty of data models out there. The ones we're most familiar with are connected to programming languages and their functional flavors. Algol, Pascal, and C have their records and procedures. Prolog has statements and rules. Smalltalk, C++, and Java have objects and methods. SQL has tables and statements. At their core, each of these systems describe data in the same way: atomic data nuggets...

In my last post, we learned that RDF is all about describing resources, and that resources are referenced with URIs. So how does it describe them? Let's start by looking at the source of this very page (View / Page Source). There's two snippets of RDF embedded in the HTML. The first helps tools like Movable Type create what are called "trackbacks", links to this post from other people's posts. Here's the RDF: <!-- <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:trackback="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"> <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://bigfractaltangle.com/archive/2003/12/26.jsp" trackback:ping="http://immuexa.com/cgi-bin/mtype/mt-tb.cgi/80" dc:title="RDF intro, part 2" dc:identifier="http://bigfractaltangle.com/archive/2003/12/26.jsp" dc:subject="Tangle Yarns" dc:description="In my last post, we learned..." dc:creator="timothy" dc:date="2003-12-26T21:49:46-08:00" /> </rdf:RDF> --> First,...

My last week of postings have been mostly sauce with no meat, which means it's high time I quit with conjecture and start talking turkey. For those new to the Semantic Web, I'm sure you're saying, "How do I use this stuff?" I know how you feel. When I'm learning a new technology, I'm usually relieved when the writer stops talking around things and finally addresses the topic directly. So for my first "tangle yarn," I'll tackle RDF, the Resource Description Framework, since it's the technological foundation for the whole magilla. There's a lot written about RDF and friends. I'm...

The word "semantic" is one of those words people sort of understand, but not completely. Like "humility," it's a word that's hard to pin down. Most people don't really know what it means, which is ironic because it means meaning: "of or relating to meaning in language." So, are we trying to build a "web of meaning"? Well, here we run into a similiar problem: "meaning" has many meanings. We use it to show intent ("I mean to please") or purpose ("I was meant for this job") or significance ("you mean everything to me"). We also use it when connecting...

In 2000, my wife and I wanted a new house. We drove all over, we talked with our realtor, we went to open houses, we looked online. Nothing felt right. We decided to write up our "top ten" lists of what we wanted most. My list led with "space" and "light" and "land". Hers included "jacuzzi" and "closets" and "great kitchen". We both wanted "fireplace." These lists became our informal search profile. Such profiles are the stock in trade for real estate agents, whether they're helping you buy or sell a house. The better a realtor can predict whether a...

Today I tried to do something I've been meaning to do for a long time: get my websites to validate as strict XHTML. Till today, I haven't rated it enough of a priority to take the time. Giving myself thirty minutes for the first site, I made it most of the way, but bailed because I couldn't get the layout to work easily in all browsers. Now don't get me wrong. I'm a standards conscious guy, and I believe strongly in refactoring. I'm always taking that extra five minutes (or thirty) to make things more readable, more flexible, and more...

He lives below the senseless stars and writes his meanings in them - Thomas Wolfe In Shelley's starlings post, she talks about the URI debate, and how some think we can sidestep the word "resource", since we've gotten this far without precisely considering it. Usually, while reading debates like this, I begin to feel like a kid with his hands to his ears, yelling, "na na na na na" to block out the sound. Thankfully I was a philosophy minor, which means I've developed a tolerance for this "what's in a name" nonsense. I once wrote a paper on Russell's...

Even if you're not from Missouri, it's easy to say "Show me" when first told about the Semantic Web. Maybe we've all become skeptics in the wake of so much failed dot-com exhubarance. Maybe it's the way semweb advocates sometimes sound, describing it as this self-evident holy grail, forever in the future, but arriving any moment. Maybe it's the word "semantic", which to most people gets prefaced by "just", as in "let's drop this pointless argument, it's just semantics." Maybe our society loves to see successful people fail. Who better to take a dive than the founder of the last...

(continued imaginary conversation between Angela Tesoro and Timothy Falconer, now sitting in her board room with her financial advisors) Angela: Everyone, this is Tim Falconer. He's been helping me understand this Semantic Web stuff in the last few days. I'm now convinced there's a need for the technology, but I still haven't heard the most important part: will this make us money? Timothy: I'm convinced it can, particularly given the ideas in the prospectus you gave me. Your startup company essentially wants to create a worldwide technical talent search system, like Monster.com, only decentralized. I showed you FOAF yesterday so...

(continued imaginary conversation between Angela Tesoro and Timothy Falconer, sitting with a laptop at their local WiFi equipped bookshop) Angela: Since yesterday, I've been doing "page source" on a bunch of web pages like you showed me. Sure enough, lots of them have these meta keywords. I even gave some thought to our keywords and had our webmaster change them after looking at some competitor websites. Timothy: Meta keywords are just a small example of where we're headed with the Semantic Web. They're baby steps at best. To do better, we need to annotate stuff using shared metadata vocabularies. Angela:...

(continued imaginary conversation between Angela Tesoro and Timothy Falconer, now sitting in her office in front of her computer) Angela: Yesterday at lunch you were telling me the world needs more metadata, and that metadata is a kind of one-off description of "real" data. What I don't understand is why this is new. Isn't just about everything we do with computers related to metadata? My friend Julie uses annotation in Word all the time. And isn't every form we fill out on the web like this? I type in "Angela Tesoro" in the "Name" field. Isn't "Name" meta to "Angela"?...

(continued imaginary conversation between Angela Tesoro, billionaire founder of a fictious women's health club franchise, and Timothy Falconer, advocate for the Semantic Web) Angela: Okay, now that we've ordered lunch, tell me about the Semantic Web. What is it? Why should I invest in it? Timothy: Let's start with some definitions. There's basically two pieces to the Semantic Web puzzle: 1) annotating content with metadata, and 2) doing stuff with that metadata. Angela: I'm already lost. You sound like those guys from yesterday. Timothy: (smiling) I'll explain. By "content", I mean anything you can make with a computer or put...

(what follows is an imaginary conversation between Angela Tesoro, billionaire founder of a fictious women's health club franchise, and Timothy Falconer, advocate for the Semantic Web) Angela: Hi Tim, it's Angela. Got a minute? Timothy: Hey Angela. Sure, what's up? Angela: This morning I was approached by a startup company that's looking to make and sell some computer software. They're convinced they're gonna make millions of course, and they need an angel investor, which is why they met with me. Their ideas sound pretty good, but you know me. I'm not the most computer literate person, which is why I'm...

Imagine you're at a party with people you don't know and you walk into the following conversation (a terrific summary by Peter Van Dijck, btw). You listen politely, not wanting to interrupt, all the while wondering "Just what in the hell are you people talking about?" To a newcomer, we must seem like blind men describing an elephant, debating the semweb's essential nature from our differing vantage points, but rarely addressing the most basic questions: what is the Semantic Web and why should anyone care? If you're new, and you're nodding your head, hoping someone will put the pieces together...

I read somewhere that in the early days of telephone, early adopters had a tough time selling the technology to city businesses. Back then, it was standard practice for executives to dictate messages to secretaries, who typed them up to be sent to the mail room, where they would then be rushed by bike messengers across town to the mail rooms of other businesses, which would then deliver them to the executives upstairs. When presented with the idea of a telephone, executives thought, "Why bother? We'd just be saving the bike messenger a trip, and they're cheaper than the telephone...

In Shelley Power's "The Value of Human on a Humanless Web", she talks about the mom scenerio in the Scientific American article: "Mom needs therapy? Oh no! Well, we'll work together and make sure she's taken care of!" In this picture, I search for available plans in the area and then call the hospitals and I talk to the people to see if I can trust them to take care of mother; neither I nor [my sister] is so busy as to begrudge the time taken. " While I agree with most of her article, this part rang false for...

Given my entrepreneurial background, I was shocked at the open exchange of ideas in Sanibel. Most projects I've worked on have had non-disclosures. Most of my colleagues hold their cards close to the chest. My amazement reached its peak on the demos & posters night as I walked from station to station, hearing one breakthrough after the next. "This is way too easy," I thought. Given adequate funding, I could probably turn at least six of those projects into lucrative ventures. If you're doubtful, call me up. I'll rattle off the how and who, brainstorming market, branding, and sales potential....

"In the long run [people] hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high." (Thoreau) Mr. Shirky's article The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview is a real piece of work. I don't agree with any of it, but I'm still glad he wrote it. Nothing motivates me more than baseless partisan bluster, and while I know he's just muddying the waters to appear deep, I've decided to use his article, and him, to make a larger point. This is the promise of the Semantic Web -- it will improve all...

Years ago, at my father's old ad agency, I took over in the accounting department after they'd let a woman go who'd been doing the books. For a month I struggled with her filing system, rummaging in the cabinets for ten minutes each time I wanted something. Bills from the same health insurance company would sometimes appear in "Insurance", and sometimes under the company's name, and sometimes under "Benefits." I finally gave up and took a week to completely reorganize everything. The ability to organize is a teachable skill, though it's often seen as a personality trait we've either got...

Putting aside for a moment all this pie-in-the-sky, we-are-the-world stuff, let's switch to more immediate concerns. We were warned by our keynote at the conference against overhyping our efforts, and he's right. The more we reflect and rhapsodize about our vision, the more we'll tune out the press, and thereby the decision makers. Better to sneak up on them ... we should underpromise and overdeliver. But there's a bigger reason to shut up about it: I think in the short run the Semantic Web is more likely to fail than succeed. I went down to Sanibel to see if "it's...

Borislov Popov wrote in response: "As all tools in the world, the Sem Web will be just a tool ... It will be employed by people, so the people are the ones to change; because the tools are just artificial limbs for us --- they fulfill our intentions ... They will help if our intention develops, as does the internet in some cases and radio'n tv in others." Well said, and history agrees with him. With each technological advance, there's always a few optimists like me shouting hope from the rooftops, who then later agree that their world-changing advance is...

Many of the talks I had in Sanibel were about our current social problems: what they are, why they persist, what can be done. I loved having so many Europeans to talk with, since I find them to be more open, more personal, more informed about world events than many Americans, particularly in professional settings. It might seem odd to have a whole lotta philosophizing going on at a technical conference, but I was thrilled by it. As technologists, we have more power to change things than often we realize. With something as pervasive and as influential as the Semantic...

A day before the conference started, I was sitting in the whirlpool at the Sundial reading Practical RDF by Shelley Powers with a highlighter. I was pretty focused on the book, so I didn't notice the four people that joined me in the whirlpool while I read. I looked up after a while and began being more friendly ... they were all Americans, and all on vacation. After we talked for a while, the man across from me asked, "What's the twenty second rundown on RDF." Apparently he had worked in IT before he retired, and geniunely wanted to know....

I decided to do this a month ago tonight. I was getting a reckless drive home along Sanibel streets to the Sundial, just coming from a talk-filled dinner with a dozen or so DERI folk, worried I wouldn't have enough time to sleep and pack before returning to Pennsylvania the next morning, when I thought of it: Big Fractal Tangle would be the name of a blog. Earlier that day, we'd all seen the Tim Berners-Lee keynote speech at the end of the five-day ISWC 2003, during which he said the phrase as an aside while describing the Semantic Web....