-> Semantic Web in the news

Non ho fatto in tempo a segnalare molte cose, importanti, accadute nelle ultime settimane.
Ma il caro Tim Berners Lee lo ha fatto stamani in un modo eccelso.

E ha puntualizzato un paio di cose.

**There was the buzz about Twine, a “Semantic Web company”, getting another round of funding. Then, Yahoo announced that it will pick up Semantic Web information from the Web, and use it to enhance search. And now the Times online mis-states that I think “Google could be superseded”. Sigh. **In an otherwise useful discussion largely about what the Semantic Web is and how it will affect people, a misunderstanding which ended up being the title of the blog. In fact, the conversation as I recall started with a question whether, if search engines were the killer app for the familiar Web of documents, what will be the killer app for the Semantic Web.

Il problema da focalizzare non e’ tanto nell’applicazione chiave che possa lanciare il Semantic Web, quanto nel capire la filosofia e l’approccio nuovo, che e’ un nuovo modo di intendere il Web medesimo, in una forma evolutiva del concetto stesso di link e di come strutturiamo in forme piu’ o meno trasparenti l’informazione che pubblichiamo online.

One thing to always remember is that the Web of the future will have BOTH documents and data. The Semantic Web will not supersede the current Web.** They will coexist**. The techniques for searching and surfing the different aspects will be different but will connect.

Nulla sparisce di quello che c’e’ oggi, ma si migliora ed evolve.
Stiamo facendo evolvere il modo di trattare l’informazione, e quindi anche la sua trovabilita’. Ma in un contesto sempre di Rete.
Di Ecosistema.

Nulla distrugge qualcosa. Yahoo sta iniziando ad usare massicciamente queste tecnologie per migliorare la resa dei risultati, anche in chiave competitiva verso Google, e’ ovvio: ma non avremo mai una killer application online del Semantic Web. Unica. E soprattutto da sola.

Ne avremo molte, che condividono dati in forme piu’ aperte e innovative, pronte per far nascere un nuovo modo di co-operare, anche a livello business. Gli strumenti iniziano ad esserci, serve la mentalita’ giusta.

La giusta chiave di lettura, in breve: queste tecnologie permettono nuovi modi di gestire, e di co-operare con i dati che pubblichiamo online, per far salire di livello la potenzialita’ tecnologica e di piattaforma offerta dal Web e dalla Rete in generale: l’utilizzo dell’intelligenza collettiva, in forme piu’ evolute ed intelligenti .)

The benefit of the Semantic Web is that data may be re-used in ways unexpected by the original publisher. That is the value added. So when a Semantic Web start-up either feeds data to others who reuse it in interesting ways, or itself uses data produced by others, then we start to see the value of each bit increased through the network effect.

So if you are a VC funder or a journalist and some project is being sold to you as a Semantic Web project, ask how it gets extra re-use of data, by people who would not normally have access to it, or in ways for which it was not originally designed. Does it use standards? Is it available in RDF? Is there a SPARQL server?

Nei prossimi giorni pubblico quello che ho fatto emergere all’OpenCamp, che rendera’ maggiormente chiara questa potenzialita’ che stiamo gia’ avendo in questi giorni.
E che e’ direttamente collegata con quanto ha fatto emergere Sir Tim.

The Semantic Web is here, just use it and learn it

Un vecchio post a supporto, per contestualizzare il tutto

-> Stop e leggere: Sir Tim parla del Giant Global Graph - step 1

Per chi e’ curioso, riprendo un tema mica piccolo, che Tim racconta, come spunto di discussione per un post futuro…
Sui media e sulla blogosfera…

Un aspetto sociale della vicenda

The “Google will be superseded” headline is an unfortunate misunderstanding. I didn’t say it. (We have, by the way, asked it to be fixed. One can, after all, update a blog to fix errors, and this should be appropriate. Ian Jacobs wrote an email, left voice mail, and tried to post a reply to the blog, but the reply did not appear on the blog - moderated out? So we tried.)

Now of course, as the name of The Times was once associated with a creditable and independent newspaper :-), the headline was picked up and elaborated on by various well-meaning bloggers. So the blogosphere, which one might hope to be the great safety net under the conventional press, in this case just amplified the error.

[…]

The Media Standards Trust is a group which has been working with the Web Science Research Initiative (I’m a director of WSRI) to develop ways of encoding the standards of reporting a piece of information purports to meet: “This is an eye-witness report”; or “This photo has not been massaged apart from: cropping”; or “The author of the report has no commercial connection with any products described”; and so on. Like creative commons, which lets you mark your work with a licence, the project involves representing social dimensions of information. And it is another Semantic Web application.

Un post dedicato arrivera’ per non appesantire troppo questo .)