Re: Vote for my Semantic Web presentation at SXSW

On 8/18/11 9:44 AM, adasal wrote:
> Increadably interesting exchange.
>
>     4)  We're about semantics, so why do we not preferentially target the
>        problem areas where semantics are and have been a problem in the
>        past? One simple problem I've bumped into in my daily database work
>        is that it's amazingly difficult and time-consuming to import and
>        export stuff from/to an RDBM, because even the lowest level type
>        semantics can't be carried by most export formats. Where's the
>        SemWeb solution to that? That's for certain a problem that is being
>        experienced every day by at least tens of thousands of people, it
>        has to do with (granted, low level) semantics, yet there is no
>        commonly accepted solution.
>
>
> That, and the issue of data accuracy were at the heart of my last role 
> and there wasn't any thought (apart from myself) of using semweb 
> technology.
>
> There is always a commercial angel to this. For instance there is a 
> service that cleans data, owned by Google and the fact that it is not 
> in house would have prevented its use in my context.
> There would still have been a lot of work to do to establish a full 
> tool chain for our purposes, the learning and knitting together effort 
> was just not worth it in the short term.
> The development was exactly in the area Kingsley outlines - mobile.
>
> There are other issues.
>
> Commercial
> Kingsley is looking at web wide solutions, but I can see little to 
> motivate Facebook or whomever, to change their architecture.

The route to motivating any commercial entity is via "opportunity 
costs". Make their opportunity costs palpable and they will soon fix 
whatever is broken. If they can't fix it, they'll buy your venture, 
assuming you seek that route as your entrepreneurial exit :-)

Every business worth it salt monitors "opportunity costs" just as the 
chairman of the U.S. federal reserve or UK chancellor of the exchequer 
track inflation. Bottom line, nobody likes "value killers" .

> It just may happen anyway, I don't know. But all of these companies 
> need to protect their revenue streams, I suspect (it is difficult to 
> do a close and thorough analysis) this is problematic.

See comment above :-)

>
> Fundamental
> There are fundamental issues of human behaviour and trust, not to 
> mention machine error and unclean data. These are different 
> categories. To stick with the human. Referring to my last post. Lacan 
> defines the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real. It is quite useful (but 
> welcome to take with a pinch of salt). The point is that people also 
> exist in the Imaginary as much as they use and are subject to the use 
> of the Symbolic and (in some way) confront the Real (a psychological 
> construct). People want to, need to, slip under the radar - think of 
> all the bulletin boards and the 'personalities' on them as an example. 
> People want, need, inaccuracy, unreality, but to generate it 
> themselves, not have it forced down their throats by a machine that 
> never forgets.
> I think this is a challenge for use of the semweb - again further 
> analysis and thought needed.

We need total recall that's context sensitive. This is the kind of thing 
that's natural in the Web's Data Space dimension.

What we have to do is introduce the Web's Data Space dimension via its 
Information Space (the WWW as most know it). dimension.

Of course, nothing I've stated applies uniquely to the WWW. All of this 
applies to enterprises too. Simple example, a new employee joins the 
sales or customer services teams. They receive an email, but have no 
context re. the sender. An email address is a mailto: scheme URI, that's 
all they should need to construct a zeitgeist of the email sender.

Note, there is no rule that states http: scheme URIs are the only URIs 
that resolve. They are just the most cost-effective due to WWW ubiquity :-)

Kingsley
>
> On 18 August 2011 14:17, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com 
> <mailto:kidehen@openlinksw.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 8/17/11 10:20 PM, Alexander Johannesen wrote:
>>>     As for the mobile space, absolutely!
>>     I personally don't think the mobile space is any more or less
>>     interesting in the SemWeb debacle at all, or gives any special weight
>>     to it.
>
>     Here's why I give it special weight:
>
>     1. Form factor of phones and tablets
>     2. Focus -- the focus the attention of the user to very specific
>     intentions.
>
>>     It's all a mish-mash network of clients and servers that should
>>     enable those killer users, that's all, whether they use a phone,
>>     tablet, PC, or paper, or their fridge. I'm almost tempted to say that
>>     SemWeb technologies enables a better mobile environment instead.
>
>     From a mobile device you can do the following:
>
>     1. Find things around you -- helps you make the best of your location
>     2. Short Annotations -- describe where you are or what your
>     experience was (you get some crappy service from a hotel or
>     restaurant just make a little annotation en route to full review
>     later)
>     3. Smart Friending -- discover people around you e.g. conferences,
>     and persist your bonding via semantically enhanced pinging
>     4. Use QR Codes -- e.g. capture details of the presenter/speaker
>     at a session you attend (when we get conference organizers to
>     print QR Codes by default etc..).
>
>
>>     I can understand that things like Google Places on a tablet with 3G is
>>     almost a killer app, it's at least damn sexy, but it's still a far cry
>>     away from getting work done and earning money or even creating
>>     something cool.
>
>     Correct. Hence my comments above.
>
>
>>     Damn useful, but not essential, even if I'm out
>>     driving for good coffee (which is very hard to find around here).
>
>     We'll you can find coffee, beer, and much more [1] .
>
>
>>     For the SemWeb to have its killer application, we need to look at the
>>     old definition of "application" and go from there; to apply solutions
>>     to problems not easily solved without.
>
>     Yep. Another example is EMAIL spam as per my earlier post [2].
>
>
>>       This baggage of "an app", as
>>     you say, often served in a directory on a file system is the problem,
>>     not "an application of systems thinking through software." In many
>>     ways, SemWeb**is**  service-oriented architecture, except not talked
>>     about in that way by business consultants.
>>
>>     But you know what I think the "killer app" would be? Accurate data, or
>>     more to the point, ways of discovering and deduct more accurate data
>>     from the current imprecise and fuzzy data now available.
>
>     Serendipitous discovery of relevant things, with precision.
>
>>     The
>>     representation is completely irrelevant to the problem SemWeb tries to
>>     solve, and I'm often surprised as to how little AI and clever
>>     analytics there seem to be in our domain - there's this strong trust
>>     in data providers that drives me insane! - but then, maybe I'm reading
>>     the wrong blogs or subscribed to the wrong mailing-lists ...:)
>
>     No comment :-)
>
>     Links:
>
>     1. http://www.delicious.com/kidehen/iphone_linkeddata -- find
>     stuff around my current location
>
>     2. http://goo.gl/2Rqx1 -- using WebID (an application) Linked Data
>     to kill off SPAM via semantically enhanced mail filters
>     3. http://www.delicious.com/kidehen/linked_data_demo -- other demos
>     4.
>     http://www.slideshare.net/kidehen/solving-real-problems-using-linked-data-1661535
>     --  solving real problems with Linked Data presentation (old
>     presentation)
>     5. http://goo.gl/de5Q0 -- creating, deploying, and exploiting
>     linked data (another old presentation) .
>
>
>>     Regards,
>>
>>     Alex
>>     --  Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX,
>>     RESTafarian, Topic Maps --- http://shelter.nu/blog/
>>     ---------------------------------------------- ------------------
>>     http://www.google.com/profiles/alexander.johannesen ---
>
>
>     -- 
>
>     Regards,
>
>     Kingsley Idehen 
>     President&  CEO
>     OpenLink Software
>     Web:http://www.openlinksw.com
>     Weblog:http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen  <http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/%7Ekidehen>
>     Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
>
>
>
>
>
>


-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen