Europe’s Future Internet initiative – a Semantic Internet of Services & Things

I spent some time today checking out the EC’s Future Internet initiative to glean insight into the EC’s vision of the future of the Internet. STI International made the video below titled The Future Internet: Service Web 3.0 to communicate the essence of this vision:

Service Web 3.0 is actually a sub-project of the broader Future Internet initiative. Core to this vision are:

• A semantic web
• An interconnected web of data and things
• A connected web of services
• A social web

A couple interesting related publications are:

• Future Internet 2020, from May 2009, and
• Towards the Future Internet – Emerging Trends from European Research

There are also a couple interesting videos from Graham Hench of STI International on semantic service-oriented architecture. The first video, titled Service-oriented architectures, presents a broad overview of service-oriented architecture as it applies to a semantic service web:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

The slide deck from Hench’s talk can be found here. The second video is Service-oriented architectures: Case study.

In the first video, Hench presents an interesting slide that illustrates how the EU views/organizes the core programs of work encompassed within the Future Internet initiative. Here’s the slide:

At the center of this slide are four core themes:

1. Network Architecture and Mobility
2. Internet of “Things”
3. Content Creation and Delivery
4. Services Architectures

And of courses, as Hench mentions in a previous slide, there is a pervasive “need for semantics in order to meet the challenges presented by the dramatic increase in the scale of content and users”.

Interesting stuff.

glenn

RDF/RDFa in Drupal 7 – Stephane Corlosquet presentation from April 2010

A very nice presentation by Stephane Corlosquet from April 2010 titled The RDFa initiative in Drupal 7, and how it will impact the Semantic Web. The slides accompanying the presentation can be found here.

Also, a collection of screencasts on Drupal and RDF/RDFa are available below:

• Semantic Drupal — State of Drupal keynote, DrupalConSF 2010
• The Semantic Web and Drupal, part 1 – November 2009
• The Semantic Web and Drupal, part 2 – November 2009

All building on the vision first articulated by Dries Buytaert at Drupalcon Boston 2008.

glenn

Two thumbs up for Hendler’s and Allemang’s keynote at Semtech 2010

Professor Jim Hendler and TopQuadrant Chief Scientist Dean Allemang do their version of Siskel and Ebert during their keynote at Semtech 2010 – by reviewing four videos related to the Semantic Web, and giving these videos a thumbs-up/thumbs-down review. Here’s the video:

Hendler and Allemang review excerpts from the following videos:

• The Westlaw Advantage: The West Key Numbering System
• Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web
• Inform CEO Neal Goldman interview with Businessweek
• Web 3.0 a doc by kate ray

I really enjoyed the session, which I spent the better part of the day watching. But a bit too bagged to comment on right now. Maybe another time.

Enjoy.

glenn

Intro to the Semantic Web (Web 3.0) – Video by Kate Ray

I had heard some good things about an intro video to the Semantic Web by Kate Ray, but had never got around to looking at it. Well here it is:

I still haven’t actually viewed the entire video, but when it was recommended in Hendler and Allamang‘s keynote at Semtech 2010, I figured it was an important view.

Anyway, I still haven’t watched the video. So if you have any thoughts/comments, please share.

glenn

Semtech 2010 videos now online

Just noticed that several videos from the Semtech 2010 conference have been uploaded online. The videos that sparked (or SPARQed 😉 ) my interest are:

• Pull: The Business Shift Behind the Semantic Web
• Facebook’s Open Graph
• Google Rich Snippets
• The Social Fabric of Semantics – I’m particularly interested in this video, as it’s delivered Jamie Taylor of Freebase. Freebase was recently acquired by Google, and this was a very strategic acquisition IMO.
• The Next Generation Consumer Business – Semantic Real Time Intelligent Decision Automation
• From Relational Databases to the Semantic Web: New W3C Standards and Directions Part Two

glenn

Power of Metadata to enable Business Transformation

Introduction

I’m currently reading a business-oriented book on the power of the Semantic Web to enable new business models called Pull, the Power of the Semantic Web to Transform you Business, by David Siegel, and published December 2009.

I’ve read several excellent technology-focused books on the Semantic Web, including Semantic Web Programming and Programming the Semantic Web. But this is the first book I’ve seen that specifically looks at the Semantic Web, and structured Metadata, from the vantage point of enabling Business Transformation and the development of new Business Models.

BTW, David Siegel recently delivered the keynote at SemTech 2010.

Metadata enables Smart Objects

I’m currently about 30 pages into the 250-ish page book, but several key messages have already been presented. And the one that most immediately grabbed my attention is the notion of “smart objects” [BTW, Siegel doesn’t explicitly use this term (at least he hasn’t thusfar in the book), but it is a notion that underlies much of this message.]

The key idea here is that objects – products and content – have a unique ID, and associated metadata, such they effectively “know about themselves”. They know what their meaning is and how to describe themselves, they know where they’ve been, they know what state they are in, and so forth. Obviously, these are not exactly the objects as we encounter them in the everyday world. Rather, we are speaking about an electronic representation of the object, that has some smarts associated with it.

In the first 2 chapter, Siegel provides several examples in the Shipping and Retail industries. In the shipping industry, he talks about smart “packages”. Quoting Siegel:

Using a new universal tracking number and open standards for messaging creates package-level autonomy: the package itself will send a message to the customer to make sure he or she is there to receive it.

The basic idea here is that an electronic representation exists of a package, that is basically “smart”. It knows about itself, and it can respond to events that are of interest to it. As well, the “vocabulary” that describes the data and events associated with packages are formalized as an industry standard, so that packages can easily cross process boundaries between different companies in the industry, that operate in different parts of the supply chain. This is the “package-level autonomy” that Siegel mentions above.

Another example is “smart products” in Retail. Here, Siegel provides examples of a Smart Cart and Smart Products. The Smart Cart knows what products you’ve put into it, and can take actions on the items currently in the cart – whether its adding up the total, applying coupons, or providing information at checkout.

Smart Products are tagged with bar codes and RFID codes as universal identifiers and tracking tags, whereby scanning these tags can provide product description information, competitive pricing information, and can be used to track the transport of product across various stages of its production and delivery lifecycle.

Smart Containers manage and leverage Smart Objects

It’s not, however, just the objects themselves that are smart. It is also the “containers” of these objects – whether the container is a Shopping Cart, a Shipment, Carton of items, a Palette of goods, or a Truck. Smart Containers know precisely the nature of the goods or products they contain, and what state they are in.

Applying the “Smart Object” concept to the Media Industry

Can these concepts be applied to the media industry? I think they can. The media industry has its own version of objects and containers of those objects. Our objects are most importantly Content – Articles, Photos, Videos, etc, and the discussions and conversations around that content. Our packages are the containers for this content – Publications, Websites, Web pages, and Stories that aggregate multiple types of content.

So, like the smart objects above, our objects – our Content – needs to be “smart” or “intelligent”. It needs to know about itself, it needs to be self-describing. And our “containers” and media products need to be able to take advantage of that intelligence – to understand what content is most relevant to our audiences, and make sure that content is available and discoverable by our users when they want it, where they want it, and in the form they want to consume it.

On the web, of course, one of the most important rationales for “smart content” is to make it easily discoverable by Search Engines – SEO-friendly, as they say. In this sense, a Search Results page is like a “dynamic container” that is constructed on-the-fly according to a Query that specifies relevance criteria (metadata) that express the intention of a user/consumer (machine or human) at that particular moment.

We also need to be able to learn from the behavior and media consumption patters of our users. To “learn” from their behavior, and calibrate our content delivery to their preferences and behaviors.

In Summary

Well that’s it really. Just wanted to:

1. Introduce the notion of “smart” or “intelligent” objects and containers, powered by metadata
2. Suggest the power of these intelligent objects to transform existing, and enable new, business models, and
3. Suggest that the Media industries have their own versions of smart objects and containers – their content, and the platforms, products, and delivery channels that showcase their content.

glenn

ReadWriteWeb’s top 10 Semantic Web products of 2009

Just stumbled across an article from Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb on the Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009. Many of the products are one’s I would expect to see there. Nonetheless, it’s a nice summary.

This post is a reminder to myself … “Self, read this article carefully, and understand the deep trends”.

glenn

The Semantic Web in 2009 – Overview

A nice overview of Semantic Web technologies delivered by Lee Feigenbaum of Cambridge Semantics and Co-chair of the W3C SPARQL Working Group in May 2009. Here it is:

glenn

What is RDFa? – Mark Birbeck

In a previous post, I referenced an excellent talk that Mark Birbeck gave at Google in 2009, as well as a couple excellent introductory articles he wrote on RDFa.

I was re-viewing Birbeck’s Google TechTalk on RDFa, and really liked his brief explanation about what RDFa actually is. So thought I’d quote Birbeck from his talk:

I’m using RDFa as a bit of a shorthand, because I’m saying really “embedded metadata”. I’m saying any way of actually putting information into the HTML page, rather than the traditional semantic web approach of having a “separate channel”. By separate channel, I’m saying you might have had an RDF-XML document, or even an RSS feed you could regard as a kind of semantic channel of information. But a channel of information that’s kind of distinct from the web page.

Whereas what we’ve done with RDFa, and what the people behind Microformats were doing, basically the same goal, was actually make the HTML page the carrier of the metadata. And some times it’s carrying metadata about other things, and sometimes it’s carrying metadata about itself. So really, when I say RDFa (throughout this talk) I’m generally meaning those kind of solutions that allow you to embed metadata.

The reason I’m favoring RDFa is because it’s very specific goal was to align itself with RDF, so it’s actually much more precise than Microformats, but the idea is the same that you embed information [in the HTML page].

So that’s the purpose of RDFa according to Birbeck. As far as what RDFA actually is:

As for what it is, it’s a W3C standard now. It’s something we’ve been working on for four or so years – which I guess is quick for the W3C, we’ve been working on it for quite a long time, and it recently became a standard.

And it’s very much about defining the syntax of how you embed information. It’s not really about saying what the vocabularies should be. Whereas Microformats is very much more about the vocabularies.

And a good example of the flexibility of what that brings is when Google did its Rich Snippets, it just came out with its own vocabulary. It got a lot of stick for it from the Semantic Web community, or some there. But the point is that you were able to just come out with your own vocabulary, because RDFa is about the syntax and the structure, rather than the actual terms.

So it’s very much in the spirit of the Web in the sense that it allows people to define their own vocabularies or reuse existing vocabularies, and put them into their documents however they see fit.

So RDFa is a standard, and its goal is embedding metadata in pages.

That’s a very nice exaplanation I must say. Please view the entirety of Birbeck’s talk for deeper insight into the mechanics of RDFa.

glenn

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) – Learning Resources

A nice set of learning resources for the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative at the DCMI’s Metadata Training Resources page. In particular, there’s a series of links to presentations delivered by Makx Dekkers and Thomas Baker in December 2009 in Florence, Italy. For ease of access, here are the links:

• History, objectives and approaches of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative – Makx Dekkers
• DCMI and the metadata landscape – Makx Dekkers
• Basics of Dublin Core Metadata – Thomas Baker
• Data Integration and Structured Search – Thomas Baker
• The “metadata record” and DCMI Abstract Model – Thomas Baker
• Web-enabled vocabularies – Thomas Baker
• Linking legacy data – Thomas Baker
• Outcomes of DC-2009 – Makx Dekkers

Just reading the Basics of Dublin Core Metadata presentation now, and for someone who’s relatively new to Dublin Core, it’s both fascinating and very well presented. Just a couple quick slide visuals to illustrate. First, the Dublin Core vocabulary circa 2000:

A very nice, clean, well-factored representation. And then there’s the important migration from 2003-2007 of the Dublin Core to RDF and the Semantic Web:

And the there’s the structured search scenarios that Dublin Core seeks to enable today:

And so the story progresses. Lots of semantic gold in them thar presentations. 🙂

glenn