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!

During practical RDF projects, one big challenge is always how to choose good URIs for your resources. The RDF standards say very little about this topic. There are some best practices and helpful recommendations, but they are scattered all over the web. Creating "cool URIs for the semantic web" is hard.

Richard Cyganiak, Max Völkel and myself have written an article about how to choose cool URIs, filled with practical knowledge and background information about the problem and solutions. We have collected what we have learned during projects such as Semantic MediaWiki, dbpedia, D2R Server, Gnowsis, and Nepomuk. We hope that this article is a help for you or your students to get started programming Semantic Web applications.

Read it

• Cool URIs for the Semantic Web (html)
• Cool URIs for the Semantic Web (PDF version)

Abstract
The Resource Description Framework RDF allows you to describe web documents and resources from the real world—people, organisations, things—in a computer-processable way. Publishing such descriptions on the web creates the semantic web. URIs are very important as the link between RDF and the web. This article presents guidelines for their effective use. We discuss two strategies, called 303 URIs and hash URIs. We give pointers to several web sites that use these solutions, and briefly discuss why several other proposals have problems.

Notice: we have written the article late last year, but published it this year. You can republish or copy this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 License.

I was on a sailing holiday at the beginning of February, ten people on a catamaran in the Carribean. Thanks to sailing, we had an Offshore Navigator on a laptop, recording the positions with a GPS mouse.

Using this GPS track and the photos taken with our two cameras, I was able to create a KML file from the journey. I used some custom PHP code I have written, a little MySQL/PHP/FlickrApi/GoogleMaps hack. It took two days to hack, which is quite nice. Included is a photo annotator to place pictures with some productivity tools (copying the position from one picture to another).

The first result is a Google Earth KML file. It shows the track of the boat and the pictures from Flickr. The other crew members don't have flickr accounts... yet.


Second, I wrote another script that sets the needed geo-tags on flickr based on the geocoding. See my flickr map.


Now that I have the code, I would love to go on with these things. Is there an open source project which dedicates itself to such mashups? We could also use Chris Bizer and Richard Cyganiaks D2RQ to make a sparql-endpoint for geo positions. Who is in?

Is there an API for plazes.com? So many things to do :-)

Henry Story visited Vienna, and he liked it.

I can copy that, Tassilo and Andreas are nice people to hang out with, and Vienna has got the most open wifi access points you will ever need.

Read his story.

Announcement:

The Semantic Desktop Hands-on Workshop will be an opportunity to learn about ongoing research and development effort in the area of Semantic Desktop, Semantic Web, and Personal Knowledge Management. It will consist of a scheduled program of talks, presentations and demos, and self-organized phases of active software development in small teams, going into hands-on development on concrete projects together.




Participants are practitioners, researchers, and interested IT persons; it is encouraged to contribute by presentations or demos of your work. Deadline for registration and submissions is March 28th.

Date & Place
April 12th - 14th, 2007,
Freie Universität Berlin,
Takustr. 9,
Berlin,
Germany



This is the perfect opportunity to meet Semantic Web people, visit Berlin, learn and do Semantic Web things. Registration, participants list, more details are all on the wiki page. Feel free to add your contributions there.
* http://www.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/bin/view/Wiki/SemDeskHandsOn2007April

Kingsley Idehen, Uldis Bojars and John Breslin have published some ideas on how to link data from various web 2.0 sites.

Thats exactly what we wanted to implement in gnowsis 0.9.2, although we missed the great looks for it :-) look here!

Here are the blog posts about it

• Personal URIs & Data Spaces
• Linking personal posted content across communities

The idea is to use URLs from OpenID to identify people, a good approach.
Some things have to be thought of:

• It should be connected with the required 303 redirects (a person is not a document, the URL must not return a web document but instead a 303 redirect).
• Not only to aggregate the data, but also to aggregate the ideas. We need to create a personal tag cloud, like we have done in the PIMO

If you dig Java, checkout the aperture.sourceforge.net project to find code that reads flickr, can and should be extended.

It has happened! The Sesame developers finished the first beta of Sesame 2.0. This day marks a great moment in RDF development, as we have a successor to the very popular sesame1 server. Leobard says: well done guys, gratulations, enjoy, cherish, drink beer, a good reason to do mardi gras. Here the full annoncement, as received via e-mail:

We are ecstatic to be able to announce the first beta release of Sesame
2.0! Sesame 2.0-beta1 marks the end of architectural changes to Sesame 2
and allows us to focus on adding features and fixing bugs, and you to
finally see the Sesame 2 API as it is meant to be. You can find the
latest version in the download section at http://www.openrdf.org/ .

So what's new in Sesame 2.0-beta1 compared to previous alpha releases?

* Repository, Sail and Query APIs stable.
We have moved from alpha-stage to beta-stage, meaning that the
core APIs, the interfaces and method signatures, are now frozen
and stable. This ensures that you as a developer will be able to
upgrade to future releases without fear of breaking your
application. See the JavaDoc API documentation and the user
documentation for more details.
* Improved Context Support.
We have improved the way Sesame handles contexts, allowing
developers to freely access any combination of zero, one or more
contexts in a single repository. Use of Java 5's vararg feature
ensure a flexible, easy-to-use API.
* Sesame 2.0 Web Client.
beta1 features the first release of a web client for Sesame
servers. This web client can be deployed as a webapp and can be
used to conviently query and modify a Sesame repository running on
a (remote or local) Sesame 2.0 server.

For a more complete and detailed overview of changes, see the ChangeLog
at http://www.openrdf.org/ .

Of course, we would not call it beta if there were not some things
missing as well. Our ToDo list includes:

* A MySQL storage backend is under development but not yet available
in this rlease.
* Custom inferencing is not yet available.
* The SPARQL query engine does not yet support ordering and a few
other language features.
* Fine-grained security on repositories is not yet available.

As remarked before, this beta release marks an important step in Sesame
2.0 development: instead of focusing our development efforts on the core
structure and architecture we can now start paying attention to
(aforementioned and other) features. You can expect regular beta
releases as we add more of the 'good stuff'.

Of course, we owe a great debt to the many contributors and
co-developers of Sesame 2. Thank you all for your patience, and we hope
you are as pleased with the result as we are.

Deliriously yours,
the OpenRDF development team
-- Aduna - Guided Exploration www.aduna-software.com Prinses Julianaplein 14-b 3817 CS Amersfoort The Netherlands

back to work, back to the web, just sitting on my couch with Rinne, a typo 3 guy who was with the T3BOARD07 - a snowboarding week of typo3 geek and geekines.

watch their amazing video of a week of snow and party...

Colorful and entertaining report from the #1 TYPO3 event of the year!. T3BOARD07 was held in France, Les Deux Alpes, last week in January - the 6th time! 130 participants from 10 countries in Europe. You will see snow, people, girls, football, tour de chambres and what was on the agenda for the lucky ones. And some extra gags are thrown in.


THE VIDEO

Hey, we should do the same with Semantic Desktop in Europe. The Semantic Snow 2008 - who is in?

The word is out there - the german "Technology Review" magazine, a partner of MIT's technology review, has published an article about the semantic desktop and myself in its februar issue.



If you happen to be in a german-speaking country like Germany, Austria or Switzerland, go to a good bookstore and buy the february 2007 issue. The article sums up my idea of a Semantic Desktop very good, and they also have nice articles on the future of food. The keypoint is, that Semantic Web is a good idea, and Semantic Desktop can help start it.

Gordon Bolduan interviewed me, and I will publish a photo of him interviewing me (which I made) later in February - because I am going on holiday now! see the next post for more...