Entries Tagged 'Semantic web' ↓

A few interesting links related to the semantic web from the Nieman Reports team.

Click here for the links…and know that they welcome more links.

I recently interviewed David Siegel, author of the new book Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business. It is part of my research into this topic that some think could dramatically change how information is found, presented and used…a topic of no little interest to journalists who spend so much time creating information they want others to find and use.

What is the semantic web? Siegel says the shortest definition may help: “If it is semantic, it is unambiguous, if it is on the web and can be found, it is the semantic web.”

We talked about how the semantic web has been a long time in coming and he agreed, saying that if you get too narrow in defining the semantic web, you could say that it is still in the lab but he thinks that 2010 is the year that people say that it starts to be real.

In his book the discussion of the semantic web is really along side a much larger concept of what he calls “pull”. He believes that every business is switching from pushing to pulling and that if “you don’t switch from pushing to pulling in the next ten years, you are road kill.”

What is pull? Siegel says it helps to think about how we have spent the last thirty years digitizing and with the semantic web, “Now we have to make the digital stuff make sense.” Once data starts to “make sense”, meaning that we move beyond simple tagging and make the sure that data is organized in such a way that it can be linked to and used by the others, we will have a world where data can be pulled by users when they need it.

This goes far beyond search (although the semantic web helps there), to creating a world wide web that is not just made up of documents that we can find, but the data we need.

For Siegel, this involves the creation of personal ontologies that will help organize your world and bring you the information you need. He says this idea of searching for music, for example, is something that “Your kids will just laugh about this. Your personal ontology will line up music for the next six years, more than you could ever listen to, not to mention news and narratives.”

For Siegel, this ability for computers to help find valuable information will transform every business and the way we interact with the world around us. He offers a number of examples in his book but a simple one of his own life could suffice. He says he loves the circus…so there should be a way for him to find out that Cirque du Soleil was coming near to where he lives in New York City without him having to search for it or just find out by accident when reading through a paper.

As for those who are concerned that having machines tell us about our world in such intimate detail could be constraining, Siegel argues that “this personal ontology will be a better serendipity engine” by constantly discovering relevant yet unexpected information for us to use in our daily life. By making known personal preferences Siegel argues that we can “add your own structure on top of the world.”

In a world where Siegel says “Asking questions of search engines can drive you nuts,” he wants to see a way an intersection between news, which is a push based presentation to a pull concept where you can get relevant information for your life that you have questions about quickly without having to always search.

This is the larger pull concept, having a way to query your world of knowledge, your friends, the institutions you trust, the places where you have gotten information from before without having to guess the key words that will generate the data you need.

In a world where people can manage their preferences and have the desired information pulled into their world automatically could change forever how news is consumed. It may not be happening in 2010 but Siegel says news organizations need to start to think about the end of push and the start of pull.

Media X is one of those interesting efforts that you run across at Stanford University.

Here is their official definition of who they are:

“Media X at Stanford University is a collaboration of Stanford and industry that brings together Stanford’s leading interactive technology research with companies committed to technical advancement and innovation.

The Media X research network sponsors Stanford faculty and researchers studying basic issues about the design and use of interactive technologies. The multidisciplinary projects that result are influencing the next generation of commerce, learning and entertainment.

Media X research focuses on people and technology – how people use technology, how to better design technology to make it more usable (and more competitive in the marketplace), how technology affects people’s lives, and the innovative use of advanced communication technologies in research, education, art, business, commerce, entertainment, communication, national security, and other walks of life.

Media X is affiliated with the H-STAR Institute (Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute) at Stanford University.”

This is the schedule for the winter semester of guest speakers:

Media X Philips 2010 Winter Seminars
Immersive Environments for Health, Education, and Productivity

Mondays, 12:30 – 1:30 pm
#124 Wallenberg Hall

January 25 – Television Meets Social Media
Gurminder Singh, Naval Postgraduate School

February 1 – User-Generated AI for Games
Ashwin Ram, Georgia Tech

February 8 – Immersive Environments for Mental Health Services
Dan Gillette, InWorld Solutions

February 22 – Linking Work/Play in a Virtual Sales Event, Case Study
Kenny Lauer, GPJ Digital Solutions

March 1 – Videogame Abbacci
Keith Devlin, HSTAR

March 8 – Integrating CRM into Social Media
Lyle Fong, Lithium

Full Disclosure: I’ve been working with some of the Media X team

There is a lot of discussion about augmented reality in some of the classes I’ve taken here at Stanford. I’ve heard it mentioned in a communications class as well as marketing and in the design school.

I’ve touched on it briefly as part of the discussion we had with one of the leaders of the Institute For the Future in an earlier post and hardly a day goes by without one story or another.

Today I received two links from two different people related to AR.

This first is a TED posting about what some call the sixth sense.

This second is a NYT about sensors in mobile phones becoming much better.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/mobile-phones-ingest-more-single-serving-devices/#preview

The importance of the second one is connected to the first. When you can have 12-14 mp cameras with you at all times and can connect it with the computational power in the cloud…you could have a second awareness…more than AR…it could be a way to be operating in a 360 real time real world data stream that is being processed constantly and separately from you…where cameras on your person (imagine them being embedded in your clothes or glasses) are monitoring everything around you and highlighting important opportunities for you to interact with your environment, in effect, being like a guardian angel, coach, and yes, even match maker.

These very powerful sensors could see more and process more around you, notifying you if a friend is walking by across the street or that a news stand has a cover story you might be interested in or that a car is coming too fast from a direction that you are not looking at. Yes, in theory it could even scan a criminal database and tell you to stay away from some people or use an algorithm to calculate your chance of being harmed in a certain neighborhood. It could, as we have seen in some experiments already, record your day and offer you the chance to play it back, giving you a transcript of your day and looking for patterns in the data that could help you succeed in the future (it could look into your frig and then remind you that you are low on milk when walking by a store).

I imagine a day when lawyers will be able to finally accurately bill hours because this 360 camera system could detect when they are reading about one case and then taking a call from another. Of course there are concerns about privacy and being marketed when being out and about but what a tremendous boost this could offer to some people who want to have a second consciousness helping them make the most of their day.

Call it your Artificial Twin…Artificial Intelligence married to a virtual version of yourself.

In the last month the Knight Fellows had a conversation with Mike Liebhold who has graciously allowed me to share some of the observations from his presentation on the future of the web.

Liebhold has a deep background in technology and the media which make his view points particularly valuable to innovation focused journalists.  Before he was a senior research for the Institute For The Future he was a VP CTO for Times Mirror Publishing and Senior Scientist for Apple Computer.

For those not familiar with the IFTF in Silicon Valley, Liebhold gave us a little introduction into this think tank focused on tomorrow.  He described how they had a wide range of clients and how their team in most cases is doing a three to five year forecast. How accurate are they with their predictions? Liebhold said they had someone do a look at past predictions and believe they have a seventy percent accuracy rate.

The IFTF team members create their forecasts by aggregating a large number of expert opinions and using the philosophy of “the future is already here but not evenly distributed”. Liebhold says the key is to look for “signals” of disruptive change. With this foresight, the IFTF believe that their clients can have insights into opportunities and take action to guard against threats.

So what is the future of the web? Liebhold had these bullet points for the next five to ten years.

Supercomputing cloud

Immersive Web Thing

Web Sensor

Web Real time

Web Video

Web Geospatial

Web 2.0

Semantic Web

Worldwide Web

Here is a quick and incomplete summary (his comments went beyond my notes) of what he shared with us on each of these points.

In web 2.0, Liebhold says the critical factor to embrace is that information is not static and can change dynamically.

Liebhold says when it comes to the mobile web, he thinks we will look back and see that this time is day one of the mobile web. He credits the iphone as kicking off the mobile web saying that you could look at the web on prior phones but in an unsatisfactory way.

Built on top of the mobile web, he sees the geospatial web (more on that in a moment).

He believes the video web is just beginning. He says the statistics around the growth of the video web are startling and that the world wide web will in many ways be a video web. He acknowledges that words/text are usually the most compact way to convey information and that some videos are relatively content free but much of what is consumed on the web will be video.

The Real Time Web is emergence of concepts like Twitter and Facebook updates. Sensor Web is how we can think of little electronic devices reporting back to the web. Liebhold described the emergence of very small HTML capable servers which could mean many devices could be linked to the web.

The Thing Web is lots and lots of mechanical devices that will interact with the web.

The Immersive Web is where you will have 3-d displays of information to interact with.

All of this is taking place in the supercomputing cloud. Liebhold says this concept is much more than just placing services on the cloud but super abundant computer power that will be available to use in almost any application. In Liebhold’s mind, networks are changing. One of the founders of IFTF was a pioneer in packet information so the institute is familiar with different kinds of networks. He said that we are entering the era of meshed networks. When every node will be able to repeat and pass along information we says we can anticipate many new peer to peer services.

To help put your cell phone in perspective, given the current network, the “world computer” (meaning connected everywhere) is a voice and text phone. By 2015 the institute says the latest generation smartphone world computer will be voice, video, web, GPS, and sensors. The institute projects that these will be devices that are very cheap…Liebhold says there are iphone like devices in other parts of the world that are under $100. What is particularly interesting is that he says there is research that shows that people are buying iphone like smartphones in place of computers.

What does this mean for journalists in the big picture? People around the world (of all socio economic status and regions) will be related to each other through a vast network of multimedia information. These devices will be part of identity centric computing… mobile devices as the hub of our digital identity. That is because we are generating a lot of data as we use these emerging technologies and there are a lot of people who are going to be able to track that information about us.

Other exciting concepts? Wearable sensors that can track your respiration and body response to changing conditions. Liebhold told us he has a particular interest in this and if you think this is science fiction, he says he has already found over 60 different sensors that people could buy or wear today. These could connect real time to medical professionals which could dramatically change medicine.

Smart houses have been around for a while but Liebhold sees significant changes in technology. He thinks we are headed toward the day when the house or your phone or your personal assistant software knows all about your agenda and needs and thus can proactively generate a highly personalized experience or series of recommendations and options. This speaks to the emergence of context awareness in computing.

Now for a specific focus of his presentation as promised. Liebhold says the geospatial web is rapidly becoming reality. He asked us to imagine you can see the invisible information about a place…digital information visually draped around the real world you are walking around. This could come from your mobile or even glasses that you would wear. He pointed out we have all sorts of information on the web that has geocodes. Information is now being created that we can use and view “in space”.

Some of the things Liebhold thinks this could allow? You can imagine as you look at a wall, you could see the conduits, or if you are walking by a building, the history of it displayed next to it, or see a theater as you drive by and know what events are coming up inside your car. A related concept is the tricoder challenge, the concept that a device could display all the information you need to know about a place is starting to be realized. Fully realized, this is a device that will tell you all you need to know about the place and it’s infrastructure, help and safety, environment, public and civic information, related news and media, history and archives, social cultural webs, commerce nets, entertainment.

There are still challenges ahead for those who are creating these concepts. Liebhold says if we are lucky, web data has the necessary tags. There is no semantic framework that completely addresses the issues of geolocating information although he said there is important work taking place in this area. The challenge he described is merging structured and unstructured data. Much of the existing data around us is still not easy to get to and so not as useful. Missing meta data makes it a challenge mining geodata but he says this rapidly changing.

The good news is that in this geoweb development, Liebhold says we have the benefit of a convergence in software design. As content is being encoded using KML and other concepts, many data experts are are finding ways to better organize geographic information. For example, Liebhold says geocoding capabilities are now a standard in many digital cameras and similar capabilities are now being built into mobiles. He suggested journalists relax our view that news has to be new. If you can aggregate the information about a place, it has value. For example, Liebhold liked the idea of being able to show someone standing in Times Square a wide range of stories, pictures and views of that place on their mobile.

With the emerging computing capabilities (computer cycles dropping in cost), Liebhold says we can start to mine tremendous amounts of information about any place. Other values to geolocation? Liebhold says we will have computers that will translate text to speech. Tourist applications are obvious, like in an art gallery where your mobile could tell you about the painting you are looking at.

Environmental sensing is another application of geolocation. Liebhold says that we can build very dense monitoring systems that can give a tremendous amount of data in real time. One example, the idea of “citizen sensing” where your phone can monitor air quality. Location intelligence is rapidly developing and he referenced the idea by talking about augmented shopping… where just by taking a picture of the barcode or an image of the product, you could learn all about the product and how it was made, things like carbon footprint and of course, where it might be sold cheaper.

I hope this is a good introduction to some of the interesting concepts that the IFTF is looking into.  The Knight Fellows hope to have another meeting with the IFTF team over the winter to examine some of these concepts in depth.

An interesting way to think about how people will search for information is how words are connected to other words in meaning and in use.  A graphic representation of this is found in a Google product called wonder wheel.  It is just one example of this trend but for me it was the first opportunity to see the graphic concept up close.

I was doing some keyword research for the 16 Fox Television Stations about a year ago when one of our station web producers told me about how he was doing research for keywords related to weather.  He had just come across the Google wonder wheel concept.

Click here for an example

This visual connection from one word and concept to the next helped me see some of the opportunities to improve our coverage and our search potential.  You can see this same visual concept showing up elsewhere on the web, for example, at the visual thesaurus.

It’s not unlike the prezi presentation concept.  Some of the students used this zooming presentation editor in the Howard Rheingold social media class at Stanford that I just finished.  It helped to inspire some very wide ranging and impressive discussions because unlike a power point, it allowed for one to see the big picture while diving into details and various media.  It looks like a lot of work but we were visited by the man behind the prezi company in Howard’s classroom and with the assistance of a partner who twittered the discussion, he was able to build multi-media presentations of the class room conversations in real time.

All of this in many ways goes back to the concept of mindmapping, which is about building the connections between ideas, something you can do on a piece of paper but is given full flight by on line applications.

A journalistic application of these ideas is found in muckety.  I saw that company present at the Online News Association meeting in San Francisco and was amazed at how complete (and complex) some of their mapping of influence and power were.

With the emergence of 3-d media, one can imagine the day when we’ll have constellations of words and concepts floating before our eyes and like a science fiction movie, will be able to move among them and dive deeper.  That will be truly immersive search.

If you have other mapping, visual connection software, please let us know.