Who said that conferences are more and more useless? Web 2.0 conference 2005

Frederick Giasson

I read something some months ago saying that the conferences, symposiums, etc. are more and more worthless and useless considering their business evolution, etc, etc, etc. I do not know if he was right, but the only thing I know is that the Web 2.0 conference 2005 is not the case. In fact, people are more than enthusiast to follow it. Many discussions are emerging everywhere on the blogsphere about it, and about the subject it covers: the web 2.0. More than ever, people try to define what is the Web 2.0, a hype term that people use in any context.

I already tried to roughly define what is the Web 2.0; and Tim O’reilly wrote a beautiful essay on that subject. It is a must read for anyone wanting to follow the discussions that will emerge from that conference.

So, are these conferences worthless and useless? Follow the current and future discussions emerging from that conference and re-ask you the question.

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The future of Talk Digger

Frederick Giasson

I had a lot of time, in the last weeks, to think about the future of Talk Digger. What is the future the project belongs to? The semantic web.

Two months ago, I had the idea of Talk Digger. One month and a half ago, I built it. Now I think about the future of the project. The service appear to be reliable and people use and talk about it. I learned how the system could be use while talking with other users.

Now I have a better view of the system, a vision of how it could be used, and an idea of his potential.

The future of the Internet is the semantic web: a web where his documents are computer processable. It is in this web that Talk Digger will evolve and get his full potential.

Why? The current state of the semantic web is really exciting. Many technologies are already available and reliable to make the vision a reality. Now people have to use them to make it live. To make the semantic web a reality, we need to have access to a wide range of semantic web formatted documents. The only way to reach this state is that people and companies start to make their information available in these semantic web formats. It is in this direction that Talk Digger will evolve: make the information broadcasted by the service available, in RDF, to the semantic web agents. I will also create new sub-services that will (1) gather, (2) analyze, (3) process, and (4) display such information.

This vision is drove by a personal goal: make the semantic web a reality. This is ambitious and probably arrogant: I know. “Who dares win’ a SAS motto says. It is what I will do: dare.

Do I have a chance to reach my goal? I hope so, but I have no idea. The only thing I know is that it will be a reality only if everybody tries to do a little thing in that direction; there is the little things I will try do to:

  • Make Talk Digger results computer processable
  • Develop semantic web applications that will interact with the Talk Digger system
  • Write about the subject in such a way that any Internet users will understand
  • Educate people to this future reality through writings and oral presentations

This is the future of Talk Digger, my blog, and my professional carrier. As you know, I have been in Vancouver two weeks ago. The aim of this trip was to meet the guys behind Qumana, Lektora, and AdGenta. Last month I got a contract from them to develop a new feature in Lektora. Now, I got the contract to develop a new version of Lektora in the next months. Guest what? I will re-design it in such a way that I will be able to easily upgrade it to enter it into the semantic web era. In which way? Secret. But it is why I say that my new goal will also influence my professional career.

So what is next? The implementation of new search services such as Google Blog Search, Yahoo!, Altavista, and Alltheweb into Talk Digger.

After? I will come back on this later.

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Ajax and the Semantic Web

Frederick Giasson

Ajax and the Semantic Web: currently two buzz terms; one that describe a new way to create interactive web interface; the other that describe documents in such a way that computers could “understand” their semantic meaning.

Tim Berners-Lee wrote something interesting: RDF-AJAX: 7 letters that open a window on a new world. We have two layers: one that shows things (Ajax), and the other that describe, by their semantic meaning, things (Semantic Web document).



You have to see the interactions of these two layers as the man-machine interactions. The Ajax layer will read a Semantic Web Document (RDF, for example) and make it human readable. The document will be computer readable by other software agents.

Big deal, you are thinking? Think about it. Right now, databases information is serialized in HTML files to help human to read and understand its information. Good, however, what happen if I wish to create a software agent to help me to automate some processes? There is the big deal. What I want is to serialize the databases information in Semantic Web formats, like RDF, instead of HTML. That way, the information help in these databases will be computer readable and understandable. Then, the problem is that I will not be, anymore, able to read and understand these big chunks of RDF documents.

There is the utility of the Ajax layer: to make RDF, or any other Semantic Web format, documents human readable. We could use an Ajax library that would understand RDF documents, and display their content in a browser. That way a single web page could be both processed by computers and humans. The Web would not be composed of HTML documents anymore, but Semantic Web formats ones.

There is another view of the future Web.

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Systems openness: a characteristic of the Web 2.0

Frederick Giasson

Recently, many people said that companies will need to open and share their APIs to enter into the Web 2.0. Many people also said that the future of the Internet, the Web 2.0, is to share APIs [see paragraph 3], to give possibilities provided by an API to anybody who needs it to develop their own system with these capabilities. Yahoo! Already do it with technologies like his Content analysis web service use by TagCloud, Google too with his map API, and Microsoft will start soon too. The question is: is there only APIs to share?

No. People seem to forget that we need information to use with these capabilities. What I say is: companies will need to start to share the information they gather and analyze in the same way they share their APIs. It is a premise of the Web 2.0: the information will be decentralized in such a way that people will have information to share with everybody, and that information will be formatted in such a way that computers will be able to process, analyze and understand it. To reach such a state, developers, companies and hobbyist will need to start to share their information that way. The relation between all this information and their structure will form what we could call the Web 2.0. It is not just a question of functionalities given by APIs, but one of knowledge: of information. We need information to use these APIs, and right now, the information is partial and hard to extract.

The most beautiful example we have of this type of information are the web feeds (RSS or Atom). If you check at a web feed, you will not understand anything (at a first glance at least). It is an example of an information document formed for computers and not humans (like HTML documents). These protocols (RSS and Atom) are really primitives; however, many, many way to use them has been found. Hundred of application uses them to gather or publish information in different ways. The information is presented in such a way that any software, platform independent, can understand and display the information available in these documents, notwithstanding of what the information is.

If you go to the Web 2.0 Conference 2005 web page, you will be able to read at the top of the web page:

“Web 1.0 was making the Internet for people, Web 2.0 is making the Internet better for computers.”

— Jeff Bezos

All the Web 2.0 idea in one quote. It is really beautiful to have all these online APIs available; now we need the information.

Tim Berners-Lee already said:

“Envisioning life in the Semantic Web is a similar proposition. Some people have said, “Why do I need the Semantic Web? I have Google!” Google is great for helping people find things, yes! But finding things more easily is not the same thing as using the Semantic Web. It’s about creating things from data you’ve complied yourself, or combining it with volumes (think databases, not so much individual documents) of data from other sources to make new discoveries. It’s about the ability to use and reuse vast volumes of data”

Now we need this data: this information. But we also need it in a format that software agents will be able to understand and efficiently process.

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Will communication networks eventually replace the social ones when will come the time to gather informal pieces of knowledge?

Frederick Giasson

Communication networks are spreading everywhere. The new trend is to include blogs and Wikis in these networks. The goal is to manage, archive and search conversations that two people or a group of peoples are exchanging.

However, the question is: will these communication networks, mainly supported by Internet technologies, eventually replace the social (see face-to-face) ones when will come the time to gather informal pieces of knowledge?

We will get the perspective of a project manager to see if it could. First of all, you need to have in mind that replacing it or not, these new communications networks emerging from everywhere help us archiving things that were not thinkable decades ago.

As a project manager, you will have to deal with working teams, clients, suppliers, etc. You will have an overview of the project to develop. You will be helped in your task by many sources of knowledge like, marketing requirements documents, vision/scope documents, specifications documents, or the knowledge that came from expert consultants, your workers, or anything else present in your working environment. Communication and social networks are just two other sources of knowledge in that environment.

The power of a project manager is that he is able to talk to every body that works on a project. He can talk with them about the things they are currently working on, or about more personal problems that will force them to go out of the city for a week. One of the non written tasks of this manager is to take into account all these parcels of knowledge that could help him managing his project. This sort of knowledge is gathered via informal discussions with people. With that knowledge, he will be able to re-plan his schedule to take into account that one of his employee is in trouble and that he will probably need take a week off. Without these informal discussions, it would be much harder to plan all these little irritants that could and will afflict the project.

What if these managers stops to walk around between the working teams members and only communicated with them via the latest communication tool that help him to have all the information he wants at the finger tip? Will this system will be able to give him that sort of informal pieces of knowledge essential for the good execution of the project? This is the question.

Personally I think that it could be done technically, but not practically. The problem would be that every employee would need to take time, many times, to write everything that happens in his job and in his personal live. It is impossible to archive. The employee will only talk about these essential informal pieces of knowledge if he entrust the person he is talking to, in our case, the project manager.

Have you another vision of the problem that could eventually appear? I mean, many companies develop such systems. If they develop them, they will also sell them. If they sell them, it is sure that someone will buy them (considering that some sellers are able to sell fridges to Eskimos). Do you think that these companies could expect some problems if they rely too heavily on these systems instead of the more conventional human relations?

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