Written by David Lenehan of Polldaddy and edited by Richard MacManus. David also covered the Future of Web Apps event [1, 2] in London this week. Photos from Route79, via Flickr.
I went down to the Mashup event in London tonight, which was
organized by Vecosys and eTribes. The topic of conversation for the night was:
"What's next, Web3.0? - The coming semantic web". The panel consisted of Paul Walsh from
Segala, Mark Birbeck from X-Port Ltd, Tony Fish, and Sam Sethi - who took the role of chair
for the night. Sam started by talking about where the semantic web movement was at the
moment and the emergence of Microformats. He showed us some
examples of sites that are using formats like HCard and HCalendar. For those of you who
are not familiar with Microfomats, a good example is a site called worldcupkickoff.com. They used the HCalender
format to help users bookmark the dates of games in the World Cup, in their own
calendar applications. Microformats are only supported in the browser at the moment
through the use of third party browser plugins, but it seems almost certain at this stage
that Firefox 3 is going to support them natively.
Mark Birbeck was first up and talked about his own products XPort and SideWinder. SideWinder is a platform that allows you to use web-based technologies such as JavaScript etc. on the desktop. You can put web applications in a wrapper and run them on the desktop. I'm not sure I really see the value of this product, but I don't think that he had enough time to explain its merits. Xport is a XForms processor... I wont go into XForms, but it's a technology that I'm watching closely, as it affects some of the things I work on myself.
Paul Walsh was on next, pushing the Content Labels format. His ideas generated most of the conversation for the night. Content Labels allow you to describe content on your website. You link to a Content Label in the HTML of your web pages, which is an RDF file that describes the content of your page. This is meta data and it serves a very similar purpose to the HTML meta tags of old. The difference with Content Labels is that you can have them certified.
So the idea is that lets say you have a website that talks a lot about football, has no adult content, is child safe and is in French. You can then create a Content Label describing all of these features, then you submit it to be certified. A third party authority will come along for a very small fee and make sure your content label is accurate, in relation to your site's content. The clear advantage of this is that, if it is widely adopted, we will for the first time have meta data relating to web content that is verified and can be trusted to a certain extent. Search engines can then use this to help rank sites, browsers can show only child-safe websites to children, french sites to french speaking people and so on and so forth. I talked with Paul about Content Labels for a long time after the show and I realize I have not mentioned a lot of the other possible uses and functionality of Content Labels, but I'm still trying to fully understand it myself.
Paul Walsh at Etribes Mashup; Photo by Route79
As with microformats, at the moment content labels are only visible by way of a third party browser plugin for FireFox, called Search Thresher. There are no plans to implement this into any major browser releases in the near future, but people are taking note of this technology. The W3C are about to accept it as a standard and Microsoft has shown an interest in a plugin for IE.
There were a lot of questions from the audience and a lot of people didn't feel that Microformats and Content Labels had anything to do with the semantic web. One interesting point that was raised is that these technologies only help make content on the web machine readable, but they don't make it machine understandable - which is what web semantics is all about. But in my opinion, the semantic web is a long way off yet and we can't make content machine understandable without first making it machine readable. It's going to be a long road, but I think these technologies are important stepping stones along the way - albeit very early ones. I like Content Labels and I hope to implement them on my own site.
Tony Fish talked last and, as far as I could tell, he disagreed with the importance of the semantic web. However I didn't understand what his points were, as his talk seemed a bit obscure.
I really enjoyed this mashup event, because instead of the speakers dictating to a mostly silent audience, the speakers were pretty much under the spotlight of the audience's scrutiny. Sam and Mike told me afterwards that a video of the event will be up on YouTube soon. If you're in London or near a Mashup again, go along - it's a very good experience.
Ed: Thanks again to David for covering the Web events in London this week. I've certainly enjoyed reading David's reports and so I'd like to 'open the floor' for other guest bloggers to do this - i.e. provide reports of web conferences and events, from anywhere in the world. Please email me on readwriteweb@gmail.com if you'd like to help keep R/WW readers informed of web events.
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Comments
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Great to have these seminal events covered in such a timely fashion -- thanks Richard for collating it all together. Without doubt this is one of the most interesting and useful sites on Web 2.0 today.
Posted by: Julian | February 23, 2007 1:50 AM
Yes, many thanks for the report Richard.
I get the impression there's maybe too much being read into "machine understandable" in the context of the Semantic Web. For the most part this "understanding" is simple logical reasoning down at the lower end of sophistication compared to what computers are already routinely doing. The difference is that it's done in a way that works on the web.
Ok, so you have a website that talks a lot about football, has no adult content, is child safe and is in French. Say you also have a potential reader that is 7 years of age, into sports and only speaks English. The machine can infer that the site's material is suitable for this reader in terms of child-safety, but probably won't be of interest because of the different language. It's easy to see how e.g. search results could be filtered in this way.
If the information is available, then another selection point there could be inferred : football is a sport, hence of interest to this reader. That classification may be provided by the source site, by the search service, by the reader or on a completely different site altogether.
The ability to express the statement "football is a sport" in a shared, machine-readable fashion (and the Content Label information), integrate this kind of information and allow things like filtering are facilities that the "Semantic" side of Semantic Web technologies provide. Being able to get hold of that information from diverse sources is part of the "Web".
Posted by: Danny | February 23, 2007 2:28 AM
Oops, thanks *David* and Richard ;-)
Posted by: Danny | February 23, 2007 2:30 AM
David
a nice write-up, thanks - and more pictures than I managed in mine at http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/ !
Posted by: Paul Miller | February 23, 2007 3:22 AM
I'm not at all convinced by this certification process. 1. The emphasis on a 'very low' fee. Who will certify for this and what is their value 2. Quis Custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will certify the certifiers, etc.
If Google said they would only show certified sites, then a vast industry would be born overnight as we scramble to get our sites certified. But what about disagreements - it may seem obvious whether a site is in French, or even whether it is child safe (maybe), but there are going to be millions of grey areas - is this site safe for teens? young teens? nineteen year olds serving in Iraq? Can I 'certifier shop'. What if I'm in the third world and I have a lot of sites and I can't afford the fees.
And, I quite often get a little window pop up that warns me that the certificate for the site I am about to visit either doesn't relate directly to the site itself or has expired etc. What do I do in response to this? I click OK of course - what else am I supposed to do?
Not convinced!
Posted by: Ivan Pope | February 23, 2007 5:16 AM
Ivan,
Content Labels permit self regulation and independent verification. For example, some web sites may wish to use a label to demonstrate they have a creative commons licence.
Some web site owners may seek independent verification/certification to help demonstrate their commitment and conformance to standards such as Web accessibility. Considering accessibility is a legal requirement countries such as the UK, US and Australia, the Web site own may wish to have a safety net in order to help mitigate risk.
Self-regulation doesn't work in my opinion (full stop). Please point me to a quality badge which sites can award themselves, which works, as I’ve yet to come across one that does.
ICRA is the longest established labelling authority. They were the first to adopt PICS for child protection - the old stuff that IE still uses today for filtering content, which doesn't work. ICRA asked me if Segala could provide Segala-verified ICRA labels to help increase the quality of trust in such labels. Why? Because they recognised the need for independent verification.
If everyone labelled their own content it would be a good step in the right direction. But if nobody provided verification for those who want to demonstrate more trust, we'll be back to square one.
Nobody is forcing verification of all labels for all sites. This is something which is being picked up as an assumption.
It’s about giving users the choice between sites that make a promise and sites that have been verified as trustworthy for a particular reason. This debate has kicked off on my own blog.
Posted by: Paul Walsh | February 23, 2007 7:38 AM
web 3.0? ggrgrgrgrgrgrgrgr
Posted by: foo | February 23, 2007 1:10 PM
Unfortunately, I missed the event that night since I had to head back to Moscow. I would add that we've got a technology that helps to create the Semantic Web - the web based on contextual relationships between objects (words, phrases, sentences, etc.).
Posted by: Yakov | February 24, 2007 3:08 AM
Just wanted to say I'm really chuffed that you used my pictures!
As I explained in a comment on Paul Walsh's Segala blog, I'm chuffed because:
* I took those pictures with a mobile phone
* I was holding the phone in one hand (whilst my other hand was holding my notebook)
* It was dark
* The flash was turned off (it wouldn't have been any use anyway)
And I have to say that the pictures have come out really well! Cameraphones really have come of age.
ps - was Iavn Pope in the audience that night?
Posted by: Jag | February 24, 2007 6:15 AM
Hey Jag, what phone were you using?
Posted by: karl | February 24, 2007 11:05 AM
Hi Karl, if you see my pics at my Flickr, you will notice from the Exif data that I am currently using SonyEricsson K800i for the images. But go to my latest article at my blog pages: http://www.route79.com for more examples of how my cameraphone can generate great snaps! (Ego off now!)
Posted by: Jag | February 24, 2007 2:05 PM
David,
Thanks for the mention in the write-up.
I hope you don't mind if I link to a post of mine that has a screenshot of the demo I was doing. And since it sounds like some of the things I was saying weren't clear on the night, there are also some notes on the whole "why would I want to turn a web application into a desktop one" issue that has come up in a few write-ups, and they are over in the comments section of Jag's photo of me. (Don't worry, the discussion isn't a discussion of the photo :) but relates to a comment that Jag added alongside the photo.)
Thanks again!
Mark
Posted by: Mark Birbeck | February 25, 2007 4:33 PM
Jag - Ivan wasn't in the audience.
Posted by: Paul Walsh | February 27, 2007 10:21 AM
Paul,
I agree with that you say but who verifies Segala?
(I've just realised that this is what Ivan has asked you in latin)
Posted by: Lawrence Ladomery | February 27, 2007 10:28 AM