The Future Is All About Context: The Pragmatic Web
The semantic Web has long been heralded as the future of the Web. Proponents have said that Web experiences will some day become more meaningful and relevant based on the AI-esque computational power of natural-language processing (NLP) and structured data that is understandable by machines for interpretation.
However, with the rise of the social Web, we see that what truly makes our online experiences meaningful is not necessarily the Web's ability to approximate human language or to return search results with syntactical exactness. The value of the semantic Web will take time because the intelligent personal agents that are able to process this structured data still have a long way to go before becoming fully actualized.
This guest post was written by Alisa Leonard-Hansen.
Rather, meaningful and relevant experiences now are born out of the context of our identities and social graph: the pragmatics, or contextual meaning, of our online identities. My Web experience becomes more meaningful and relevant to me when it is layered with contextual social data based on my identity. This is the pragmatic Web.
We need to better understand our identity as it begins to define our experience of the Web and the networked-enabled world we inhabit. Our online identity will increasingly be defined by three "pillars": who I say I am, what I do and say, and who I connect to (and who connects to me).
To clarify, our online identities are comprised primarily of three specific kinds of data:
- Explicit or prescriptive data (i.e. the data that I input about myself: name, age, occupation, etc.);
- Activity or behavioral data (i.e. what I do and say online);
- Relationship data (i.e. my social graph and what my connections say about me).
If we consider the power of this pragmatic Web (a highly relevant and individualized Web experience based on the ubiquity of our identity data), we find that it not only impacts individual user experience, but that it opens up entirely new opportunities for business online. The future is not "business as usual." Business models will be based on what Elias Bizannes of the Data Portability Project calls the "information value network-economic value," derived from services that focus on activities with comparative advantage and that leverage free access to data.
Consider this: as media companies scramble to identify new and innovative ways to advertise to the sea of nameless, pixeled users who graze through their content each day, a rich supply of highly valuable identity data lies just beneath the surface, left unmeasured and unmonetized.
Facebook is nothing more than perhaps the largest single database of this kind of online identity data: explicit, activity and relationship data. With the development of Facebook Connect, which allows for the "open" exchange of Facebook user data between Facebook and third parties, Facebook could conceivably (and will) create an Facebook Connect ad network (read: data exchange), supplied by the valuable and highly targetable user identity data that is currently siloed on Facebook's servers. This identity data within Facebook is what makes the activity in "social media" so valuable.
But the centralization of identity data on one or two major networks (such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace) won't realize the vision of the pragmatic Web. So, how will the pragmatic Web come to be? How do we realize the power of a dynamic Web that is based on our identities? We do so by empowering individuals to access and control their identity across any site or service, through standards that enable data portability and open Web inter-operability. The resulting vision is that of a highly personalized, dynamic, relevant and remixable Web experience, yielding greater access to information through discovery, communication and collaboration. For enterprise, this could mean the rise of innovative new business models, based on data-driven value exchange.
One final note on identity data as it relates to enterprise. As Bizannes points out, the value of this kind of identity data rests on the key factors of time and timeliness. Essentially, identity data is valuable only if it is recent. Facebook wouldn't be able to sell your (permissions-enabled) data to advertisers if it used your explicit data from a year ago rather than from today. So, Bizannes argues that real-time "access" to someone's identity matters most, and it's no longer about data "capture." Thus, as new business models arise out of monetizing permissions-enabled identity data, the value of the business models will depend on these entities having real-time access to the data.
Guest author: Alisa Leonard-Hansen is a digital strategist and Social Media Evangelist at iCrossing, a leading global digital agency. She is also the Communications Chair for the Data Portability Project and blogs about the social Web on her blog, TheWebisSocial.com. Follow her on Twitter @alisamleo.
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For those interested, the economic theory Alisa is referencing is being called the "information value network", which incorporates my initial thesis of the "information value chain".
A paper has been written on the subject and it will be released by the DataPortability Project soon.
Posted by: eliasbizannes.com
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November 20, 2009 11:59 AM
Yes can't wait to read your final paper on it, Elias!
While pragmatics is the usual stage above semantics in the old AI hierarchy, I think actually following this progression requires some reasonable basis in the lower level.
I mean, we are barely at a good syntax level right now on the web (not very good at all considering that most browsers do not show the same content the same way), and the semantic level, with all its recent buzz, is still unformed and generally not present at all on the web, despite all the W3C's efforts over the last decade or so.
Where there *is* something like semantics, it's in a narrow niche, as its presence in general is extremely minimal.
So while pragmatic-level representations of web content and applications may well be very useful someday, for the moment, I think the applications will be very narrow and very specialized -- even more limited than semantic applications.
But indeed, the pragmatics of identity are such a narrow and specialized venue that might be suitable as a pragmatic-level proving ground at least considering the technical issues. The commercial, legal, and ethical issues might be more problematic.
loved it. I've been conversing with friends about the pragmatic web all night. :)
Loved that article right up mygeni.org street.The recreation of justified lenses around the unique individual alongside Intimacy and relationship through interests alignment is key to understand relevancy of content and context. Semantic technology can help create meaningful links by understanding the what, but the how related and whom is a social almost emotional link that needs to be adjusted around level of engagement. We at www.mygeni.org have been grappling with these issues for quite some time, now in soft Beta so check it out and comment back to us please. GUI still undergoing upgrades and site only for early adopters as not mass market ready.
We need to fundamentally engage and be engaged through our own unique view of the world and be able to effect the world around us otherwise the engagement is meaningless and fleeting.
crowdsourcing, decisions, metrics, this is where the benefits of the social web can lend themselves... provided these are "validated" accounts, not your series of social web accts that are associated with homebuying or payforfollowing gimmick related accounts that can skew results. Great post.
Context is king!
I argued something similar in a guest post on TechCrunch a few months back.
Two important aspects of online identity have to be taken into account in your analysis
- Reputation data : stuff about you that other put online with or without your being aware of it, such as photographs, critics, comments and backlinks to your stuff etc. Those can exist even if you don't input any data yourself. I'm neither on Twitter nor Facebook, but there are data about me in there somewhere.
- Computed identity : data gathered by search engines or other agents and filtered by whatever proprietary or open algorithm, with all related silence and noise. Simply, a Google search on your name, or a page about you at 123people or the like.
The problem with the latter in the current state of affairs is that it mixes data you control and data you don't, and in any case in a way you don't control.
Bernard
Posted by: http://www.openidfrance.fr/bvatant
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November 25, 2009 2:40 AM
Alisa said:
"Bizannes argues that real-time "access" to someone's identity matters most, and it's no longer about data "capture." Thus, as new business models arise out of monetizing permissions-enabled identity data, the value of the business models will depend on these entities having real-time access to the data."
First, I'm wondering if you agree?
Second, isn't this a very narrow boundary around what will be of value - only real-time identity information?
And isn't this idea based on a very linear / industrial model of how we create value (aggregate > process > understand > apply)?
What's the ecosystem / network centric perspective on the kinds of past / future (predictive) identity data that will be valuable?
Perhaps everyone else understands your ideas without specific examples. But as someone very interested in all this but not extremely informed -- your second to the last paragraph would be strengthened by a speculative example of how this might "go."
What is this privacy people used to speak of?
Interesting one. Contextual relevance and real-time access always was the most important factor for any kind of customer relationship development, especially on the web.
"My Web experience becomes more meaningful and relevant to me when it is layered with contextual social data based on my identity." True and critical... The challenge for the social web platforms will be to make sure people feel save with their social graphs, and that all platform providers make data protection and security issues a major topic. Otherwiese I can see a very pragmatic "unsubscribe-wave" on some platforms...
Great post
In the same sense that "My Web experience becomes more meaningful and relevant to me when it is layered with contextual social data based on my identity." You can say my web experience becomes more meaningful and relevant by the quality of reaction coming from the communities where I interact. Which of course is made more powerful by the dynamic of contextual social data.
With the pragmatic web, as Mojoe mentioned there is a linear / industrial model at work here. However we are in a period of severe overlap between and age of linear sequence & fragmentation, to one of simultaneous inclusion. The pragmatic web, and the need to have individual identity, is not likely to disappear anytime soon if ever. It seems more likely to become more advanced and sped up a process. However the big difference that comes with the social web, is the inclusive tribal nature of this media, which is a situation for people very different from the preceding age of private individualism.
Refining your communal fit may become much more important an issue than defining your individualism. Although very much integrated.
More Social Web discussion of this type in Studio Manifesto: Exploring the Possibilities of Indie (Understanding the role and the process of the indie artist in the age of the social web). http://studiomanifesto.ca/category/stm-exploring-the-possibilities-of-indie/
The richness of data should allow for a superior consumer experience.