Last weekend we had the fourth Semantic Desktop Hands-On Workshop, this time again in Berlin. There were about 25 participants from the whole world, people from various open source Semantic Web projects, employees of companies, interested friends, professional consultants, and semantic web evangelists. All were practioners, all anticipate using the semantic web.



Nothing could possibly go wrong, and it turned out to be a great success. We had three days of intensive discussions, code hacking, demos, talks, talks, talks, and a special social event on each day. At the end, everybody was just exhausted and we had a wrapup session in the Bebop-Bar, discussing about the future of the Semantic Web until 03:00.

Here is a small video I hacked together using photos from our semantic desktop hack flickr pool.



And here more pictures from this pool:

Matthew Magain blogged the roadmap for the Web 3.0:



this is a follow-up to my thoughts about the semantic web 2.0

Kudos to Michael Sintek for pointing me to this roadmap.

Davor from the Center for knowledge transfer in information technologies/Jozef Stefan Institute wrote an e-mail, pointing to the videos of the ISWC and ESWC conferences. This institution recorded all talks at these conferences and put them online, a valuable resource if you are interested in Semantic Web.

Here is their message:
The videos are online a few months now and we believe that you would be interested in seeing them. They are published on our new video-educational web portal which has more than 1900 educational videos, including various tutorials, workshops, interviews. We hope you will enjoy in your lecture and will browse our portal...

• your videography: http://videolectures.net/leo_sauermann/
• educational portal: http://videolectures.net
• iswc06 conference: http://videolectures.net/iswc06
• eswc06 conference: http://videolectures.net/eswc06

Marian Bantjes blogged a year ago about the art of heraldic banner design. First of all: I want such a banner, darn that I don't carry my shield with me every day. Perhaps the back of my Laptop will also do. Second, this aint no bad way of annotation.

"...Corporate logos are most often completely meaningless, or they try to portray something quite complex without having a language to express it.

http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/archives/002570.html


"Designing logos would be an act of science: careful symbology applied in, yes, a creative and pleasing manner, that tells the tale of mergers, takeovers and change of business. At least then it would all mean something. Anyone could look at a logo and read its history. Logo changes would indicate what had changed. And it wouldn’t matter if the CEO did or didn’t like green; wanted or didn’t want a dog; loved or hated the shape. Then at last, we could look at a new logo and understand, “Ah, a young telecommunications company with sales over $100 million/yr which has merged with a digital company and is transistioning into the entertainment industry. I see.”

Danny Ayers blogged :
If you only watch one video this year, let it be this one: The Semantic Web of Data (streamed, 8mins 24secs)
I can only copy that, apart for my admiration for Tim Berners-Lee, this video has some very nice things to remember. Tim has the vision, he had all the ideas in the first place and he is professional enough to have no problem repeating himself, explaining the semantic web again and again.

http://www.technologyreview.com/video/semantic

The web in the first place was something which solved a particular frustration I had, it scratched an itch that ....we would make life a whole lotta easier. The web of data, Semantic Web, same thing, frustration that I cannot pull that data and pull that other data and connect them. ... How do these publication fit in with these events. ... Where is the nearest coffee place to that friend I want to take out for lunch.

So, he did the right thing: he solved a problem he had. Usually you would say that you must not use yourself as your reference customer, but it seems that there are exceptions... :-)

The video was done by the technology review, an interview. It only features Tim, no commentary nor questions.

We see the success of the web 2.0 buzzword everywhere, now we face the web 3.0 buzzword not exactly convinced who coins it and what it means. I will give my opinion on what the future is, namely the Semantic Web 2.0. A semantic web with the usability and round corners of the web 2.0, and a web 2.0 with the fantastic data integration features of the Semantic Web.

Tim O Reilly can be thanked for investing his time and his companies' resources into the web 2.0 buzzword: its good for everyone. Finally we know what we like about the web, if you don't know it yet, always read the original first.


Given this great success, namely that web 2.0 and its description really fit so well the reality we face in the web, people want to ride on with buzzwording and predicting the future. I happily join.

Today again I got an e-mail mentioning and advertising the web 3.0, which will, let me assure you, be the next big thing. Increasing the number by one and saying its the next big thing is the right approach, but it can be taken by so many. What we can't copy is the fact that Tim O Reilly stated the obvious, was able to describe the existing facts in words that caught. Web 2.0 is a way of asserting ourselves what we do, giving us the satisfaction of undestanding why google, napster, flickr, bittorrent, etc are such successfull enterprises.

So, coming to web 3.0, what is it? At DFKI we have written a paper about web 3.0 being the convergence of web 2.0 and Semantic Web. The e-mail from semantic web school I got today goes into the same direction.
And there is this NYT article on web 3.0, that you can google now for yourself. Its all in the semantics, and with semantics we hope: Semantic Web.
But who says that this is the final view on web 3.0? Any C-Blogger can invent this word, or make a new one, and you can search for web 2.5, web 1.0, web 0.0, web 10.0, web 2007.0, or whatever comes to your mind, its an open field of invention, only limited by the amount of floating point numbers, which are, lucky C-Bloggers, infinite.

Now coming to my point: what I really anticipate, and perhaps you are with me, is the Semantic Web 2.0. As easy as it looks, its exactly what it is: a simple combination of the ideals of Semantic Web and Web 2.0. Semantic is the front word because its easier to pronounce this way, but they are equal partners and both needed. The Semantic Web is longing for Web 2.0. At the moment the semantic web is scientific driven, and as we have read in previous blog-posts, for a scientist everything can be a science. Hence, the Semantic Web as such is pretty easy to use and deploy (RDF is just XML, with URIs as sugar and ontologies being the cream), but scientists working on it at the moment are pushing these innovations further every day. So, enterpreneurs a re needed that see how data integration using Semantic Web technology can save a customer money and time.

On the other hand, web 2.0 companies "be nice" but are usually working under capitalistic constraints, if not filling their own pockets, at least the shareholders'. A key in business is now to be open to data integration, like RSS feeds or Web APIs that allow you to manipulate your flickr photos, or the classical google maps API that we find useful everywhere.
The problem here is, that if you have a running system, never change it. The APIs are based on XML, and simple HTTP calls (REST). Why bother upgrading to Semantic Web?

So, there has to be a reason to extend a successfull web 2.0 business to run Semantic Web. What are the keys to open this door? Let us come back to concise words describing web 2.0 and focus on some of the points

• the web is a platform
• you control your own data
• remixable data sources and data transformations
• harnessing collective intelligence

What does Semantic Web 2.0 add to this:

• the web is a database
• data automatically integrated through ontologies and semantic web links
• harness collective knowledge using semantic links

etc etc. you now know enough to go on yourself.

semantic web 2.0 !

Frederick Giasson has written a tutorial article on using the semantic web to integrate data and make new use of data found on the web using semantic web technologies and approaches.

He shows the steps needed to create working applications, from data transformation to user interface. At the end, there is a working example that is available online.

read his post:
http://fgiasson.com/blog/index.php/2007/03/22/dynamic_data_web_page

This means that data only matters. In fact, the only thing one need now is to build a good data source. Once the data source is well built (remember, the data source can be anything here, from a search engine database to the products catalogue of a company, or even the personal web page of a 14 years old geek).

From that data source, everything can be generated for each web page (URL). If the content requested is a HTML page, then the data source can generate XML, run a XSLT skin template with and then send a HTML page: just like any other web page. However, from the same data source, a semantic web crawler could request the RDF/N3 data for the same URL. Then the DDWP would send the RDF/N3 representation of the URL.

So from one data source, you can get its data the way you want.

From that point a URL (or a web page, call it the way you want) become a presentation page web, a web service, etc; All-in-one!

The dude behind Wired said in some interview I happened to see, that the culture is stretching out. Still, the big ones get 80% of the market, this won't change, but the remaining 20% get split over a far bigger area and are increasingly important. I think he called it "the far end" or "the end of the curve", whatever its called: Important is the fact that we are moving to microcultures.

When I visit a friend, we listen to a radio station only airing electro remixes of C64 songs, which you can receive on the net. See, its the dude from Kaiserslautern who enjoys electro remixes of C64 songs who is the market of tomorrow.

You will instantly see what I mean here and get a feeling for whats happening by watching it happen: I googled for videos on the nintendo WII and all I found was microculture:


So what do you do when you get hands on a WII controller and a DJ software? Nothing, if you are like me, but if you are DJ shift-1 and take your thing serious, you go for it. You remix it, you make a video out of it, you invest a few days of video editing and you happen to have a gig at bootiesf.com in may....

There is one thing in this for my own satisfaction: when I was dancing on any techno event years ago, I longed for this experience of controlling the music by dancing. So I am looking forward to the time this hits the markets and we have youths on festivals remixing and dancing their own music... not so far away, or? If it ever happens, drag me out of my adult life and force me to join it, perhaps I will be too conservative to dig it.

Next is a video demonstration of using a WII controller on a windows computer to play Halflife two:


At the same moment, the authors refers to a wiki of the www.wiili.org developer hangout and an IRC channel on freenode.net about wiili, and doesn't forget to mention that the music we hear is from his DJ friend djsbx.com who happens to publish his trance/house music freely on the internet.

These dudes are good in what they do, they do the right thing in the right way, respect. The second video shows how this guy connects to his peers using a wiki and an IRC chat, and that he gives credit to the guy doing the music. All is done by namedropping a few web addresses. I like this. Its not much effort, it doesn't take many people or money to do it, but it reaches out.