Re: call to arms

Hi,
This seems to be a fairly free ranging conversation.
This is my experience.
Two years ago I and a group of others were brought into Serco PLC, the
company that handles the £35 mil +/year spend on businesslink on behalf of
HMRC.
I was known to have a specific interest in Web 3.0 technologies.
Over the course of the last two years I and my colleagues discovered that
Serco actually cannot sustain a technological vision of any sort, for
instance not even in terms of the basics of managing upgrades and basic
technology introduction.
Most of this original team of about sixteen have now left (as I have) or
been made redundant.
With regard to Web 3.0 I was encouraged on a few occasions to work up
proposals to form the basis for discussion.
On one occasion, about eighteen months ago, I was told by one of the
architects, Andrew Booth, that Web 2.0 was irrelevant to their business
model. I few months later I saw him reading a Butler report about Web 2.0.
This illustrates the distance the encumbent technologists are from these
issues.
My proposal was to wrap the existing site in a Web 3.0 enablement technology
with the aim of expossing the underlying data for repurposing according to
unforeseen needs of data consumers.
I was told I had no idea how expensive this would be and that I also had no
idea of their strategy. Both these statements are true, the idea was to open
up discussion. I do know that the strategy has been to use Akamai to speed
access to online materials. Note that strategy does nothing to surface the
information in those document. It implies no IR techniques as such. I know
that no IR techniques are used aside from plain search, no automatic key
term creation, categorisation, clustering or mapping between common search
terms and specialised terms in the documents.
However, the most disappointing part of the technology implementation has
been the introduction of something called skin and link in order to take
users from the internal to externally hosted web sites (other government
departments) because it embodies an Austin category confusion between data
and information. Information is available from external sites, but no data
is sent, stored, modified or returned from the external site available in
the referring site. This is a sever design compromise, and does not fulfil
some of the contractual KPIs to which the company are obligated.
There is clearly collusion between the customer HMRC, who seem not to have
the will or the ability to enforce the contract, and the supplier in these
matters.

The following are the broad points I have to make in this area, they overlap
as both business and political issues.

   1. Web 3.0 could form the backbone to a solution that would solve many of
   the problems that their current architecture currently hides - the list is
   too long to enumerate here.
   2. Web 3.0 can be introduced in a staged and modular fashion, targeting
   specific pieces of functionality with Web 3.0 solutions.
   3. Web 3.0 is the technology needed to enable the data sharing and
   repurposing of that data by private add value organisations - a goal that
   seems to be that of this and any future government.
   4. Technology funded by the government should be exemplary and future
   facing, not hide enormous waste and the problems of future development and
   improvement.

This web site is of particular interest as it is an information rich site,
and it is not really known how usage of that information might unfold in the
future.
Of course I see this as a terrible missed opportunity. The contract is up
for renewal, but it seems very unlikely that delivery mode will change.
This, it seems to me, is in a very broad way a semantic web failure.
I think this brief overview gives a good idea of why adoption is so
difficult, and in many cases, impossible.

Best,

Adam Saltiel

On 2 April 2010 03:47, Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 2 April 2010 03:18, Karl Dubost <karl+w3c@la-grange.net<karl%2Bw3c@la-grange.net>>
> wrote:
> >
> > Le 1 avr. 2010 à 15:55, Dan Brickley a écrit :
> >> I think the big question it raises, and what I'm largely working on
> >> these days, is why has all this hypertext / linkyness not affected
> >> televison very much yet?
> >
> >
> > It is killing it. Look at advertisement budgets for TV in western
> countries.
> > YouTube is becoming full of links.
>
> Hope so.  ( http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=4M5YE_a4B1U<http://www.youtube.com/watch#%21v=4M5YE_a4B1U>)
>
> tv & radio have the advantage of immediacy right now - ok, a news
> story might break on twitter within seconds, but if it's a compelling
> disaster you'll look to "old media" for the talkover and pictures.
>
> "Oh the humanity" don't really work in txt.
>
> Also it's a darn sight easier to be led to buy products.
>
>
>
> --
> http://danny.ayers.name
>
>