Hey, I’m Rick Murphy. Casey’s out and gave me a guest spot to share some thoughts on where we are with what some folks are calling Web 3.0 and what it might mean in our lives and our jobs.
Web 3.0 is really just the idea of a smart Web that helps people at home and work. Remember that Web 2.0 is a response to the perception that heavyweight planning and technologies were slowing us down. Our tools were too complex. We quickly put blogs, wikis and other social media utilities in place that shifted complexity away from our tools, but cause us to manage that complexity. For an excellent talk on this issue, see Ross Mayfield’s All Things 2.0 Are Made of People, part of PARC‘s Beyond Web 2.0 series.
The success of Facebook and Twitter increase the information available to us. Now that we all have 500+ friends and Tweets streaming at us faster than we can read, how do we keep up? Our lifestreams are overrunning our lives. Whether we tag our family photos or search the Web, we expect to get all relevant results and exclude the ones that are irrelevant so we don’t have to filter them ourselves. We need a smart Web that reduces the burden of the complexity that we’ve taken on ourselves. Web 3.0 is the idea that we can add some smarts, known as the Semantic Web, to Web 2.0. These smarts help us at home and work by reducing this complexity.
So where are we with Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web? Since the 2001 Scientific American article by Tim Berners-Lee, Jim Hendler and Ora Lassila, both skeptics and supporters have sought evidence that the Semantic Web has been adopted. The good news is that the favorable climate for innovation recently accelerated adoption of Semantic Web technologies. Most recognizably, both Google and Yahoo announced support through their Rich Snippets and Search Monkey offerings. The UK Government moved the London Gazette, a four hundred year old publication, to the Semantic Web. You can hear more in this podcast from my colleague John Sheridan, Head of e-Services, of the UK Government’s Office of Public Sector Information. Datasets from data.gov are already available for the Semantic Web and our team has used Semantic Web technologies in our Enterprise Architecture practice.
Web 3.0 is the idea of a smart Web that helps people at home and work. Facebook will produce more meaningful information about relationships among family and friends. We might discover meaningful trends among Tweets. And we’ll spend less time filtering inaccurate search results.
Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web are happening now, but they won’t happen all at once. And there’s no more appropriate time to recall the well known William Gibson quote: “As I’ve said many times: the future’s already here, it’s not just very evenly distributed.”
3) Web 3.0: A Smart Web that Helps People
George on 7/31/2009 8:34:21
I’ve been demonstrating a lot of W30 that’s already here for folks at OMB, so I thought this was a great opp to share, thanks Rick and Casey 😉
1. Helps people – understand, aggregate and select info from disparate data sets that live on the Web:
Rick linked to the data.gov datasets made available – I continued their crowdsourcing by telling a Semantic Web search engine at http://sindice.com about these URI’s so that it would index these files, and now you can use them in this novel http://sig.ma app (with apologies to anyone without a modern browser – Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, or IE8).
Sig.ma demonstrates; how you can see the relationship of lots of data from lots of different sources, select a variety for your use, and end up with a permalinked Web resource and embeddable widget.
Watch the video, then type ‘OMB Budget Authority’ into the http://sig.ma search box, and among lots of datasets, you’ll see the http://data-gov.tw.rpi.edu/wiki sources that the folks at RPI crowdsourced into W30 form, from its W20 version on data.gov.
Faceted search and browsing is a big W30 thing, enabled by the Semantic Web / Linked Data. Facets are metadata entities in your datamodel. Here’s another video example of this kind of stuff in action and what’s coming that’s worth a look – http://potlach.org/remix/remix-screencast-20080701.html
So how does W30 support defining the datamodel structures (schemas) that all these datasources on the Web are instances of?
2. Helps people – evolve data models using Social Media, and connect how the IT dots support the Org mission:
Check out the Parallax interface at http://mqlx.com/~david/parallax/ for the ‘Bizmo’ http://bizmo.freebase.com datamodel and dataset. (Once again, apologies to those that have 5 year old browsers, but try it at home! It’s easy, fun and good for you 😉
This W30 example I created shows how a line item in an Ex53 supports an Obama administration goal.
Parallax is another faceted search and browsing interface, in this case to any graph oriented (SemWeb) database on MetaWeb’s http://freebase.com – which is one well known example of doing the Social Data Web right (that’s right, combining Social Media and Linked Data Web memes here 😉
I created a Business Motivation Model (based on the open standard of the same name) at http://bizmo.freebase.com and it contains simple relationships among facets (that Freebase calls ‘topics’, and SemWeb people usually say ‘subjects’ and objects’) like vision, mission, strategies, tactics, goals, objectives, etc. You can think of facets/topics as defining datatypes. The relationships are the key to faceted browsing, aka traversing a large distributed data graph (from one facet to another), as they connect topics to each other.
Bizmo defines some simple relationships in its schema – topic / relationship / topic (called a ‘triple’):
here is a small subset of the triples in the datamodel that make the demonstration point –
Goal / amplifies / Vision
Objective / quantifies / Goal
Federal Enterprise / (has) Fed Ent Goal / (of type) Goal
Federal Agency / maintains / Exhibit 53
Exhibit 53 / contains (multiple) / Exhibit 53 Recordets
Exhibit 53 Recordset / Supports Federal Goal / (of type) Goal
I created a couple instances of these topics, using some instance data from http://it.usaspending.gov;
Obama / is of type / Federal Enterprise (we are currently in an Obama instance of the Federal Enterprise type)
Obama / has a Fed Ent Goal / Health Care Reform
HHS / is of type / Federal Agency
HHS / maintains / HHS Exhibit 53
HHS Exhibit 53 / contains / Nat Health Info Network Connect software (good example of domain specific open source community collaboration things to come!)
Nat Health Info Network Connect / supports Obama Goal / Health Care Reform
Check out the Parallax video, and when you’re done, do the following to experience this graph traversal via faceted browsing using Parallax interface to Bizmo;
i. Type ‘exhibit 53’ (with no quotes) into the (only) form field (a search suggestion box should appear and say ‘Working…’ – if not, press space or enter). The suggestion box populates, saying ‘Topics mentioning Exhibit 53 in their text content’
ii. Select the first suggestion that says ‘…in Exhibit 53 collection (2)’ and the result is a page that shows two instances of the ‘Exhibit 53’ topic (or datatype), one HHS Exhibit 53 topic and one GSA Exhibit 53 topic
iii. On the top right where the interface screen says ‘Connections from the topics on this page’, click on the ‘Contains (3)’ link, and the result is a page that shows three instances of an ‘Exhibit 53 Recordset’ topic
iv. Again on the top right where the interface screen says ‘Connections from the topics on this page’, click on ‘more connections’, and when the search/filter selection dialog box comes up, make a connection ‘To Other Types of Topic’ by clicking on the ‘Supports Federal Goal’ property, and the result is a page that shows that the ‘National Health Information Network’ topic that ‘Support Federal Goal’ ‘Health Care Reform
You have just traversed a graph datamodel from data originally exposed by the IT Dashboard (in this case, line item level Exhibit 53 data) to understand its (example) relationship to (placeholder) Administration priorities
v. On this page, select the ‘National Health Information Network’ (NHIN) link, and the result is a page about that resource with other associated properties that link to other topics
vi. Select the ‘view on freebase’ link, and that takes you out of the Parallax interface and to the unique Web resource on Freebase that represents the NHIN.
MetaWeb really gets the Social Data Web. If you’re looking for architecture clues, that’s one (of many) good starting points. Sig.ma, Remix, and Freebase Parallax are all about the Web as DB and ‘many to many’ relationship browsing.
There’s plenty more to show, share and say, but I’ll end this already too long ‘comment’ by pointing you to a Smithsonian Institution Research Info System Search site at http://siris-collections.si.edu/search/ – go ahead and hit the search button on the default ‘japanese art’ and experience faceted search powered by Apache Lucene/Solr Open Source!
=D
George
2) Web 3.0: A Smart Web that Helps People
Kitchener Marketing Consultant on 8/31/2009 0:40:35
So where does the line between 2.0 and 3.0 get defined from a technical standpoint?
1) Web 3.0: A Smart Web that Helps People
Mark B on 12/3/2009 6:22:15
Thank you Rick and Casey… Although I think this article is slightly challenging to comprehend for most readers (Including myself) one can get their head around some of the terminologies after a little Google searching resulting in a clearer understanding.
If what I understand is correct, web 3.0 is going to make tasks like searching online much faster and easier. In place of multiple searches, I might type a sentence or two into my Web 3.0 browser, and the Web will do everything for me.
Example: If a woman was to type “I broke up with my boyfriend a couple of months ago but now I want him back. What boyfriend advice should I be listening to?” The Web 3.0 browser will analyse her question, search the Internet for every likely answer, and then organize the results for her.
While I continue to search the World Wide Web, the 3.0 browser learns what I am interested in. The more I use the Web, the more the 3.0 browser learns about me and what I like, thus the less detailed I need to be with my search next time.
One of the interesting comments by a number of experts was “the Web 3.0 browser will act like a personal assistant”.
You lost me initially with the Semantic Web so I researched to find the following.
What is the Semantic Web?
The Semantic Web is an evolving World Wide Web which means the semantics of information and services on the World Wide Web is described as, making it possible for the web to “comprehend” and please the needs of who use it.
Thank you,
Mark B