#linked-data

The word "intelligence" derives from the Latin "intelligere," which meant to comprehend or perceive. In these terms, the web as we know it is far from intelligent. Tim Berners-Lee famously highlighted the modern web's limitations when he outlined what he saw as its next iteration, the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is comprised, as is today's web, of machines and data. The fundamental difference in what is and what will be is the ability of those machines and data to converse with each other, to share information freely to achieve better ends. 

That all sounds fairly boring and abstract, but it's what gets us out of bed in the morning. The Semantic Web excites us because we see its implications, the possibilities that arise from a more intelligent web. One such possibility is the reason we exist. A few years, ago, our founder, Parsa Ghaffari, wanted to build a platform that would automatically pull relevant data without the publisher (blogger, journalist, etc.) having to lift a finger. So if, for instance, an historian was blogging about the date of a battle in the Revolutionary War, he wouldn't have to stop writing to look it up; it would simply be there. 

The idea took off. Ghaffari got some funding and headed to Chinaccelerator to begin the process of making his tool a reality. An interesting thing happened, though, while attending the program: he learned that the underlying technology he needed to develop the idea simply didn't exist. Parsa realized that, for all its capabilities, the web was still very much in its infancy. If he was to build his tool, he would first have to change the web itself. 

And that's exactly what he decided to do. 

This is the premise from which AYLIEN was born. We're not a suite of apps, or a tool for publishers. We are a movement. We are what happens when a hacker's passion perfectly align with the needs of the modern world. Simply put, we want to build an intelligent web. Everything we make centers around this simple premise. Our APIs allow data to be extracted from a text, or from the entire web, with surgical precision. Our publisher tools eliminate unnecessary friction between publishers and their audience. Our consumer apps will change the way we interact with the web. Data on the web will be linked, and it will be smart. It will know what you want, and it will bring it to you. 

This is the premise we've been working under for the past three years. We've been building our vision, and now we're ready to unveil our creations. 

Right now, the web is a ransacked library. Books are all over the floor, entire bookshelves have collapsed under the weight of their own contents. The data is there, but it’s scattered, it’s chaotic, it’s insanely inefficient. Think of us, then, as your friendly neighborhood librarian. We’ll bring order to the chaos. We’ll clean everything up, and then we’ll do so much more. When you, or a machine on the web, or even another piece of data, need something, not only will we retrieve it for you, we’ll do it before you ask.

For AYLIEN, the web still has not changed so much. Although the emerge of new interactive web applications and social networks which in general, associated with the term “web 2.0” has remarkably changed the way that we communicate and interact with the web, but it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but rather to cumulative changes in the ways software developers and end-users use the Web. DiNucci, a consultant on electronic information design who coined the term “web 2.0” in 1999 writes in her article “Fragmented Future”:

The Web we know now, which loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear, and we are just starting to see how that embryo might develop. The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens. It will appear on your computer screen, on your TV set, your car dashboard, your cell phone hand-held game machines and maybe even your microwave oven.

Her use of the term deals mainly with Web design, aesthetics, and the interconnection of everyday objects with the Internet; she argues that the Web is “fragmenting” due to the widespread use of portable Web-ready devices. Her article is aimed at designers, reminding them to code for an ever-increasing variety of hardware. As such, her use of the term hints at, but does not directly relate to, the current uses of the term.

Tim Berners-Lee, The Inventor of World Wide Web described the term “Web 2.0″ as a “piece of jargon”:

“Nobody really knows what it means…If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.”

So the term web 2.0 in general refers to trends rather than the technology. It’s a fashion. The structure of the web (hypertext) is still what it was back in 1990. Techniques such as AJAX do not replace underlying protocols like HTTP, but add an additional layer of abstraction on top of them. What has changed is the ability to support and present more different type of information on the web such as video & sound, which is the result of better-evolved web browsers but not the web itself.

Developers are still using the same old method to create websites and machines are still using the same algorithm to translate those codes and give the output to the end-user. Machines are unable to understand if the article is about sport or it’s a food recipe. Machines cannot differentiate if what you are listening to is music or it’s news. Having said that, machines are unable to communicate with each other unless a human interfere. The look of the web has changed but it’s the same old crap.

In this collaborative medium known as web – where we all meet, read and write – all opinions and user-generated content are equally valuable and relevant. Everything looks the same to machines. As Andrew Keen argue that Web 2.0 has created a cult of digital narcissism and amateurism, which undermines the notion of expertise by allowing anybody, anywhere to share and place undue value upon their own opinions about any subject and post any kind of content, regardless of their particular talents, knowledge, credentials, biases or possible hidden agendas. Additionally, Sunday Times reviewer John Flintoff has characterized Web 2.0 as “creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity: uninformed political commentary, unseemly home videos, embarrassingly amateurish music, unreadable poems, essays and novels”, and also asserted that Wikipedia is full of “mistakes, half truths and misunderstandings”.

Now it seems that Internet is like a public storage that anyone can store whatever they want and companies like Google should come up with very complex algorithm in order to be able to make sense of all those data, categorize and rank them by leveraging the only peace of information that is readable by machines which are texts.

Semantic Web which is considered as the future of the World Wide Web or “web 3.0” is a group of methods and technologies to allow machines to understand the meaning – or “semantics” – of information. Web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so computers can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, combining, and acting upon information on the web.

Tim Berners-Lee originally expressed the vision of the semantic web as follows:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

In “Web 3.0” publishers and developers will go beyond the limitation of HTML and metadata tags and will literally talk to machines in order to describe each peace of content. It’s a new language and solution specifically designed for data. In a semantic environment finding a relevant information will become an easy task and machines will be capable of understanding more on what you are looking not only based on “keywords” but also the concepts.

The Glasgow Digital Library project at Strathclyde  produced an HTML version of the first 36 issues of the SMC Journal.

This includes some nice indexes human readably linking the journal articles with the People, Places, and Mountains the articles mention.

I decided to make these relationships machine-readable, and link them to other datasets to make a SMC Journals as Linked Data dataset.

Generating links to other datasets for the places mentioned turned out not to be so easy; the geographic containment relationships necessary to disambiguate the often-homonymous Scottish hills are not always presented in the same way in the usual geographic datasets. I did manage to generate over a hundred links from articles to routes they mention in Climb.Dataincubator

I also manually created some sample links to dbpedia, geonames and ordnance-survey.

I still enjoy seeing the Linked Data magic when I put a URI into a nice Linked Data browser like LinkSailor and see it combine data from lots of sources through the mechanisms of some simple owl:sameAs links and the principle of "Follow Your Nose".

For those interested in semantic web technologies, here an interesting challenge in preparation of the Workshop on: USAGE ANALYSIS AND THE WEB OF DATA (USEWOD2011) & USEWOD DATA CHALLENGE

Workshop at WWW 2011 – Hyderabad, India, 28 or 29 March 2011

http://data.semanticweb.org/usewod/2011/

Data Challenge

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