Weibel Lines

When last we left our Hero....

Other points that TBL made in his AAAI keynote (as inferred from news.com):

• Developers should use semantic languages and RDF
• Tagging will improve semantic efficacy on the Web
• The Web is the database, and RDF defines its syntax

We all agree that we want more from the Web. Not just pages, but structured data that facilitates recombination. This is essential to so-called Web 2.0 enterprise. Tim’s support of tagging acknowledges, importantly, I think, the role of people at large in driving semantics onto the Web. Not just catalogers, not just publishers, data-providers, and IT departments. End-users. (Never mind that there are no end-users in a graphical world… we’re mostly chain users.) The benefits of [bottom-up] tagging, and its relationship to top-down systems like ontologies, thesauri, knowledge organization systems, and controlled vocabularies, remains to be elucidated in any long-term way. Certainly the hype and expectation is strong, and evidence of value accumulates in the business plans and performance of myriad Start-Up 2.0s.

We can agree that the Web is a database of sorts. The Database, in fact. It lacks the formalisms of relational databases, but embodies the powerful idiom of linkage, making it both naturally object-oriented and graph-based -- flexible, extensible, robust, self-organizing.  Unwieldy, too.

RDF is intended to provide some of the missing formalisms, and thereby make the data more interoperable, recombinant, and hence re-useful. It adds little value in a closed system, and hence has experienced only modest adoption.  Presumably its value will be greater in the open system of the Web. Of course, most applications have been designed to work in closed systems, leaving RDF a long-suffering next-year’s technology.

The confusion between RDF Schema and XML schema, overlapping but disjoint schema declaration idioms, went on for years, and did little to bolster RDF’s prospects.  I'm afraid the W3C itself has to own-up to responsibility for this.

Has next-year arrived with Web 2.0 and the emergence of Web applications? As interoperability and recombination become the main attractions rather than sideshows, RDF and related enabling technologies may rise in importance, finally getting onto page-one specifications.  I think this is Tim's hope and expectation.

Google’s Norvig might point out that injecting/extracting meaning from a proprietary commercial perspective… the normalization layer alluded to in Hitchhiker 650… is likely to happen faster and have longer legs than promulgating encoding standards that require well intentioned and well informed users to deploy.   In fact, I think that has been a frequent message.  The enthusiastic acceptance of so much of what Google does (and does well), is compelling evidence that there is plenty of semantics on the Web... just not necessarily the  W3C variety.  Will Google thus own the semantic Web, by virtue of having driven normalization-layer innovation? Thinking….

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Image: Rowboats at the Center for Wooden Boats on Lake Union in Seattle, taken during the annual wooden boat show.  I'm going to spend my next life in their workshop, leaving only for forays to to Allegro  for lattes and Magus for used books.

In this Corner... Sir Tim, Inventor of the Web...!

The face-off between Tim Berners-Lee and Peter Norvig (it is probably too pointed to call it that), came from Tim's AAAI keynote flogging the potential of the Semantic Web, and the importance of various enabling technologies in bringing that to pass.  Mr. "When I invented the Web" is the right man for the job.  His vision and practicality in bringing us this most wonderously cobbled together platform has succeeded, as wiser pundits than I have observed, in part because of its ability to fail gracefully.  Document not found?  Look elsewhere... the system doesn't fail, though.  Website gone? Pity, but there are lots of others, and the system doesn't fail.  The system... the Web... is simple and resilient, and is layered on another elegantly simple and resilient system -- the Domain Name Service.

But the Semantic Web... well, semantics aren't so simple.  If the news reports about Tim's talk (and my inferences) are close, the points he made are roughly:

• Persistent Identifiers are critical
• Developers should use semantic languages and RDF
• Tagging will improve semantic efficacy
• The Web is the database, and RDF defines its syntax

Persistent Identifiers are indeed central to the problem.   I may assume too much, but I think Tim's perspective is that URIs as they exist today -- essentially, URLs -- are enough for all purposes.  On this, I would disagree. 

From a technical point of view, he is, of course, correct.  The operational characteristics of URLs, in conjunction with the DNS system, are sufficient to meet any identity requirement for online resources.  It is in the realm of policy that problems emerge.   Tim's assertion that important identifiers be persistent speaks to this, though not convincingly enough in my judgment.

The problem is that Identifiers are overloaded and multifaceted.  They play different roles at different points in the lifecycle of the resources they identify.  Changes are made to meet the exigencies of changing business models, and naming-theoretic arguments just don't hold up to those imperatives. 

Norvig's observations that users often don't understand the significance of the technical decisions that they make (or don't make) bolsters this view.

<unsubstantiated supposition follows>
So, without branded identifiers -- identifiers whose form and syntax proclaim that they are managed according to publicly defined policies -- achieving robust identity networks will be more difficult.
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image: Woodpecker, taken in May in the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, downstream from Mt. Rainier glaciers.  Andy Powell and I walked the refuge on his visit here for the DCMI Usage Board meeting.  I should note that Andy's admonition about identifiers... that departures from standard Web protocols in defining identifier systems will inevitably reduce their long term persistence, is always prominent in my thinking.

Clean SLATES

A colleague shared with me an article by Andrew P. McAfee in the MIT Sloan Management Review entitled Enterprise 2.0: the Dawn of Emergent Collaboration.

Andrew's blog entry on the topic is also worth attention.

OK... I sense the rolling of eyes (2.0 at a time)… aren’t we all tired of Everything 2.0. Maybe, but if you’re looking for a memorable pneumonic that actually imparts insight, this article has it.

The piece distinguishes between information systems as platforms (websites, intranets, portals) and channels (email, instant messaging, telephone, conversation). The one category, created by the few, accessible to the many. The other, created by many, for the many, but very little sharing. Enter Web 2.0.

McAfee’s pneumonic is SLATES, and it helps expose how platforms and channels can be brought closer and made more effective in ways that enhance productivity and effectiveness. Yes, we’ve seen most of these elements before. It is in the ease of recombination that they change how things work.

Paraphrasing McAfee:

Search: Find what you need, enhanced by emergent description (see tags, below)

Links: More to the point, link relationships or link ranking algorithms

Authoring: Ease of content creation – spare me the angle brackets, make it bone simple

Tags: What do my colleagues call this? I bet it works better than what the IT department calls it

Extensions: If you thought X was [good | interesting | important | useful], you might, by extension find Y similarly so

Signals: tell me something has changed

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Image: this owl was kind enough to pose for me along the side of the road on the way to Paradise in Mt. Rainier National Park this past weekend. 

 

They read the books???

Morning Edition Sunday on NPR reviewed the debut novel of Keith Donohue's The Stolen Child this morning.  The book sounds engaging, a modern update of the enduring changeling theme.  What caught my interest, though, was the followup story, describing how the book reached the top 5 of the Amazon sales list, and is 26th on NYTs extended best-seller list without a single major published review.

Amazon staff recognized the book as a strong contender (they read the books?), and decided to try a new approach to promoting it, leveraging their well-established customer-participation infrastructure.  Their new approach is described at the top of the reviews:

We queried our top 100 reviewers as of April 6, and asked them to read The Stolen Child and share their thoughts.

According to the NPR report, book reviews are getting less space in newspapers at the same time that the influence of amateur book reviewers is rising.  It is not lost on publishers, who apparently see the importance of high-impact reviews and promote their books' review-potential to sellers.

Is it at all unsettling that Amazon took the initiative and recruited the attention of their top reviewers?  This isn't exactly neutral marketing.  But Amazon is upfront about what they are doing, the author benefits, Amazon benefits, the reviewers are no doubt flattered at the least.  And readers are connected with more of what they want.  Sounds good to me.

Public bibliography is co-evolving with marketing, and while there are clearly opportunities for gaming the system and distorting the marketplace, it is just as clear that to ignore this important component of resource description is to lose traction where it counts: with readers.

Related posts:

First Class Objects and the Currency of Linking
The New Cooperative Bibliography

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Image: Midday wildlife sighting in the UW University district, May 2006

Tag Team Wrestling

Tim "LibraryThing" Spalding has just announced a new feature on LibraryThing, currently the most impressive instance of so-called Library 2.0 that I know of.  The new feature addresses a topic that many (including myself) have been wrestling with for a while now: the relationship of formal knowledge organization systems to folksonomies.  Tim's Mother's Day blog post speaks to the raging controversy:

Are tags better than subjects? Are subjects better than tags? Are tags just a fad? Will tags replace subjects? Are tags evil? Are subjects evil? (Believe me, the idea is out there.) Librarians have become deeply emeshed in the debate, with partisans on both sides. Until now, there hasn't been much in the way of hard data, at least for books. LibraryThing provides that.

This last is the exciting part.  LT has provided a platform to explore the behaviors of both in a coherent, data-rich system.  Researchers, start your systems!

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image: Carolyn Dunford, of the UW MLIS program,alerted me to a lovely wildlife preserve nearly within slingshot distance of the UW (known as the Montlake FIll).  This is a closeup of one or another species of Horsetail (Thanks to Bob O'Hara for the ID), taken at the preserve. 

Cheep Links

Geoff Froh, one of the MSIM graduate students who has befriended me during my stay here at the UW iSchool, sent me the following link from last September that has a lot of great ideas about creating a richer web of information -- cheaply:

Using Wikipedia and the Yahoo API to give structure to flat lists

Hackdiary is Matt Biddulph’s idea-rich blog of his travels through Web 2.0.

 

The post that motivated this entry is a succinct description of some of Matt’s work at the BBC, but it transfers pretty much wholesale to what we should be doing more of with library data:

"adding value to your own data by using external information"

Biddulph’s post emphasizes some of the benefits of the open Web that are available to anyone with a creative vision of how to capitalize on them to create more value at low cost.

One of my early blog entries was about the addition of name authority data into the German Wikipedia, and I seem to be bouncing back again and again to the concept of public bibliography – creating rich semantic linkages around traditionally-described formal resources that gives them context and heightens their visibility in Web space.   Using the open Web to enrich our assets while in turn contributing to the information assets of the Commons embodies the reciprocal creation of value that fits neatly within our tradition and is, I believe, critical to our future.

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image: Gulls ride for free on the Washington State Ferries.   And they aren't bashful.  March, 2006, near Orcas Island in the San Juans

Marshalling Resources

Marshall Kirkpatrick was kind enough to afford me an interview opportunity in his Netsquared interview series.  Read it here. 
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Pink Boa: Floral flagrante captured at the Volunteer Park Conservatory in Seattle, 2006-03-08

Social Software and Netflow

I’m gratified to see that my blog has been included on the Top 10 Sources  list of Blogging Librarians. My immediate response is to wonder why.  There are hundreds of blogging librarians, and I don’t have to work very hard at finding 10 that strike me as more erudite, timely, tuned-in, technically insightful, edgy, radical, volumetric, or just plain thoughtful.

But I’m not complaining! Its better to be talked about than ignored. Better still to be linked.  I’m happy enough to be aggregated on the library corner of a site that includes the thoughts of Lawrence Lessig,  Robert Scoble, Tim O’Reilly, David Weinberger and other notable netstars.

The why me? mystery is part of a much larger question of why we read what we read, and there are lots of subtexts. Why we read what we read online is a particularly important one, for us as individuals and for libraries.  Its the whole point of social software.

Poking around on the Top 10 Sources links, I encountered a note by Steven Cohen on RSS feeds and serendipity which took me to a thoughtful post by Ken Varnum on the topic of serendipity at risk (never mind the irony of my having found this serendipitously).

One of my dirty little secrets is that I don’t use a feed-reader. I tried feeds once or twice, and they quickly added to my guilt-stack without an obvious improvement in quality of life or productivity (and there is the laziness factor).  None of us suffers from too little to read.

I read blog posts, not blogs. There are sites I feel like I should be looking at regularly… (Digital Koans, for example, is even on my browser bar, as is Lorcan’s blog). But I don’t start (or end) my day sifting through feeds.   (Marshall Kirkpatrick promised to help me mend my ways, and I’ll report back if he succeeds).

Mostly, I rely on the social network of people and information in which we all participate to feed me stuff I need to learn about. I admit to an uneasy suspicion that this is an incomplete strategy and the explosion of interest in social software validates the notion that we're all desperate for ways to be more systematic and effective.

If RSS feeds give us the “what we ask for”, can we rely on social software and our own personal networks to provide the serendipity? I think the answer is yes, but even the slim list of stuff I extracted from my rendezvous with Curt and Marshall is a lot to digest and integrate, the tip of an iceberg growing faster than I can keep up. I’m thrashing, looking for the right mix (remix?) of formal sources, personal connectedness and intellectual netflow.  I’m guessing I'm typical. Suggestions welcome.

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Image: A brilliant spray of phlox (I think) encountered on a bicyle trip through the Queen Anne district of Seattle.  Springtime in Seattle is long, leisurely, wet, and often strikingly beautiful.

 

So, shall soft wear? Well?

Yesterday, out of the blue, Jay Jordan sent me the following message:

FYI
http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/04/02/meetup-in-seattle/

Well, what the heck... why not?  So I arrived early and watched for the baseball cap with a B, waiting for a blind date who didn't know I was coming.  Soon after 8, Marshall and Curt arrived and I introduced myself, and we set about deconstructing Web 2.0 (mostly they deconstructed, and I listened). Highlights of my Monday night site map follow:

Lulu Self publishing saleable content, one book, CD, DVD or podcast at a time.

Grazr - Web-based outline processor for better organized feeds (look under TopTen Sources for the Library Blogs); uses OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language).

Freedom Toaster Free open-source access kiosk - no internet needed (and where is Knysna, anyway???)

Netsquared.com "remixing the web for social change"

AJAX - its not just for GoogleMaps anymore.  Read about it at this link, or try some of the latest aps here

Podleaders.com Tom Raftery's podcast thoughtleader interview site.  Got a question for an interviewee? 

Ohmynews.com Citizen Journalism in South Korea... "Asian participatory anything is just way ahead, whether it's Japan or Korea"

Library Stuff  Steven Cohen's Library 2.0 Weblog

ResourceShelf Gary Price's news digest for IT professionals

Raw Danny Ayers, semantic-webhead RDF, RSS, metadata wonk tranplanted from northern England to Lucca, Italy. 

Buzzmachine Jef Jarvis' blog on digital culture and media

Librarysuccess.org A best-practices Wiki for innovation in the library world.  Managed by Meredith Farkas, of Norwich University

Dar Williams the folksinger

Mashup the idiom of Web remix culture

Pledgebank Social contracts in social software

Frappr  Link your group/photos/ideas/favorite places to the GoogleMaps API

Nicholas Carr Does IT matter?

And then, as if all that wasn't enough, I got home around midnight to dessert, from Lorcan:

The Hughtrain Manifesto
"We are here to find meaning. We are here to help other people do the same. Everything else is secondary."

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Smithsonian towers and the Washington Monument, the Mall, March 2006

Web 2.0 Awards

I'm not a fan of the Web 2.0 moniker but mostly this just shows that I'm an untrendy old fart.  I suppose its useful, if for nothing else, to demarcate the social software dimensions of Web technology.

This link to the Web 2.0 awards provides an interesting amalgamation of what is hot in this arena.

I found the link on  Marshall Kirkpatrick's theSocialSoftwareWeblog, sent to me by Jay Jordan.