Re: call to arms

2010/3/29 Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com>

> Right now, despite the promise, things seem mired in the mud. People
> aren't seeing the things that the Web of Data has proposed.
>
> How do we get over this?
>
> Face to face maybe - the bits the interwebs can't provide.
>
> I suggest the leading lights of this sturm sit down in a room
> somewhere in northern Europe, and hammer the damn thing down. It is so
> stupid for it to take so long.
>
> The Internet, and the Web is excellent at providing miraculous stuff,
> but the humans that tie the things together seem to be disappearing
> into different worlds.
>
> The Semantic Web should be useful by now, by anyone's predictions.
>

The Semantic Web IS useful, at least I find it so.

For years and years I looked for a way to login to a website without me
having to run a server or have lots of passwords, my search lead me to
FOAF+SSL, I now run half a dozen little websites, each part of my linked
data footprint, and use my certificate to login.  I can also log in to any
openid site with my own FOAF certificate.  Before apple broke it, I was able
to log into my sites using an ipod touch with one press, which I dont think
anyone has done before.

For a long time I wanted to create a task list and notifications system.  I
now use sparql update to upload my tasks to my own personal data wiki (I
sometimes use webdav), use roqet and sparql to get some values back, process
them a bit (one day I'll learn RIF or N3 rules), and then it hooks into my
kalarm clock and notifies me when I have to do stuff.

My tasks are stored in my personal 'nano' blog which scores me an integer
between 0-255 for the various things I do during the day.  I can track how
productive I've been on a given day, week or month, and compare that to my
historical and moving averages for that day, or in other contexts.  I can
update my nanoblog with the press of a key, or, just for fun I made a little
device I can hang round my neck, when I press a button, it sends a keystroke
to my machine, and relays that off to the cloud.

I run a small open source project, and wanted to reward people with some
karma every time I fixed a bug.  I can do that by hooking my ticket system
into another site which stores karma for people for the things they've done
and it's marked up in RDFa.  Indeed they can transfer that karma to someone
else, if that other person has contributed, and use FOAF+SSL.  I can get
notified when someone has fixed a bug in my project, or made an improvement
to the wiki.  In effect my project has done a virtual IPO and is issuing
it's own virtual currency, karma.  One day it might offer to buy the karma
back.

One other thing I do is that I can aggregate all the accounts in my FOAF and
my blog, and can see all the activities that they have done recently,
delicious bookmarks, twitter, flickr etc.  I can jump to a someone in my
foaf:knows list and see what they've done.  With smob I host my own
microblog on my homepage, and my posts get relayed out to my followers,
twitter, and sindice.

I haven't even mentioned linked data yet.  With linked geo data I can look
at all the amenites on my street, in my town, and link them to other
resources.  It wont be long before my friends with smartphones will be able
to check in to places, and I'll be able to meet them for a coffee.

I've only been really following the Semantic Web closely for about 2 years,
and most of that time has been learning, but if there's one thing I would
describe it as, it would be USEFUL.  Some of this stuff can only really be
done on the semantic web.  I cant describe to you how happy this makes me.
And there's so much more to come, it's only going to get better and better.
I build this stuff primarily for myself to use, but it's usable by anyone.
Once other people start using global data, using authorization, making
things read write, and linking it together, the usefulness will expand
exponentially.

I'm LOVING the Semantic Web.  We have this incredible playground, this
universe, and it's all ours!   They say that all good innovation comes from
scratching an itch.  What's your itch?  Why not use the web of data to give
it a scratch?  And maybe we can all become a bit richer from it ... :)


>
> something better change
>
> (I'm a scaredy pacifist, so don't take that to heart)
>
> --
> http://danny.ayers.name
>
>