The W3C's new Community Groups allow any developer to propose a working group for a proposed standard. As soon as there is some degree of support for the standard among peers, the group, which is free to participate in, can get started.

"Innovation and standardization build on each other," said Jeff Jaffe, CEO of the W3C. "The stable Web platform provided by W3C has always encouraged innovation. As the pace of innovation accelerates and more industries embrace W3C's Open Web Platform, Community Groups will accelerate incorporation of innovative technologies into the Web."

Previously, the only way to contribute to the creation of a standard was to present it through a W3C working group, where it may or may not get any traction and move forward. With the introduction of these new groups, developers and businesses can get more directly involved in the adoption of a standard, and can do so with access to the W3C's infrastructure.

Jaffe first told us about the groups in a session at the ReadWriteWeb 2Way Summit in June.

The W3C isn't wasting any time getting started with this new initiative. The first groups to launch will include Web Payments, Semantic News, XML Performance and Declarative 3D for the Web Architecture.

It just so happens that something like that may now be under development in the most official of venues. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced today the formation of a new Web Real-Time Communications Working Group to define client-side APIs to enable Real-Time Communications in Web browsers, without the need for server-side implementation. The Group is chaired by engineers from Google and Ericsson. It sounds like Opera Unite to me (see video below), but democratized across all browsers. It sounds like it could be a very big deal.

"These APIs should enable building applications that can be run inside a browser," the new Working Group's charter says, "requiring no extra downloads or plugins, that allow communication between parties using audio, video and supplementary real-time communication, without having to use intervening servers (unless needed for firewall traversal, or for providing intermediary services)."

The working group is focused on the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that devices will use to implement these connections, but is working with an IETF group developing a technical protocol for transmission of the data between browsers. The first indication of this work appeared two months ago with the discovery of a mysterious flag inside Google Chromium.

The W3C's new working group on all this is chaired by Harald Alvestrand of Google and Stefan Håkansson of Ericsson. It plans on meeting regularly through February 2013 and is placing a special emphasis on ensuring users have control over and are aware of what media they might be transmitting from their browsers to others.

Such data standards make it easier to develop apps that use your calendar data and make more viable the development of new calendar software without fear that users will be locked out of application ecosystems.

"Internet TV" no longer means simply bringing Internet content to the television screen. Internet TV is no longer encompassed by the idea that users want to check their email on the big screen in the living room. Instead, Internet TV has shifted from that of an Internet-enabled device to that of an integrated service, available on a number of devices.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the official standards organization of the Web, has issued a report on the transition of TV to a service, identifying several points that need to be addressed for Internet TV to become a widely available, open, cross-platform service.

According to the report, the conversation arrived at a number of "convergence priorities." Among these priorities are adaptive streaming, or keeping a steady stream of video despite changing bandwidth, home networking, the role of metadata and Semantic Web technology, and even the possible extension of HTML5 for television.

"In a world migrating from TV as a device to TV as a service available on any device," said W3C's François Daoust, co-chair of the Workshop, "the W3C is looking forward to developing ubiquitous Web technologies to enable scenarios that combine local (e.g., from home network devices) and global (e.g. social networks) sources to enhance the user experience on TV."

Right now, devices and services often compete on content offerings rather than functionality. This will change with time, however. "As television evolves further into a service," reads the press release, "people will expect the service to be available on a variety of devices, and to connect smoothly with other favorite services, including social networking and shopping. As the number and diversity of devices grows (across multiple industries), interoperability challenges will also grow."

The report identifies the W3C's proposed Open Web Platform as one solution for application development, in that it "gives designers cross-platform interoperability."

The platform would offer standardized ways to handle issues that are currently proprietary and platform specific. Issues with Digital Rights Management (DRM), for example, prohibits Android users from getting Netflix - a benefit their iPhone-wielding brethren have enjoyed for nearly quite a while. Proposals for metadata and Semantic Web solutions, for example, could make interoperable solutions between different software solutions possible. Imagine if every audio program treated MP3s completely different - that's where we currently are with Television content.

In all, that's the current state of Internet TV. It's fragmented, walled-in and proprietary. DRM technology works on one platform and not another, while one service identifies content in one way, while another identifies in a completely different and incompatible manner. Content streams more smoothly on one device than another and is available on one set-top box but not the other. The W3C's proposal would work to centralize some of these issues and have services and devices compete directly on the quality of the service provided, the functionality and interaction, rather than the basic experience.

Efficient XML Interchange, or EXI, is described as a very compact representation of information in XML (extensible markup language). EXI is so efficient that the W3C says it has been found to improve up to 100-fold the performance, network efficiency and power consumption of applications that use XML, including but not limited to consumer mobile apps. It is particularly useful on devices with low memory or low bandwidth.

EXI has been used in commercial contexts for more than seven years, but today's adoption of the format as a formal standard is the culmination years of collaboration between the W3C and 23 different corporate and academic institutions from around the world, including Oracle, IBM, Adobe, Chevron, Stanford University, Boeing, Cannon, France Telecom, Intel, the Web3D Consortium and others.

It's an amazing world where the transmission of large sets of data is costly enough relative to their creation, storage and processing (the price of those has fallen so much already) that industries have a strong incentive to work together to use standards to reduce those data transmission costs substantially.

The creation of a new data transmission standard format is an event of historic importance; it's like a new trans-continental railroad network has been unveiled, but in this case with standard rail-widths primed to make the delivery of all kinds of goods up to 100 times faster and cheaper than ever before. Florida oranges are going to make it to Minnesota for the first time, you might say, but in this century that will be a metaphor for massive sets of real-time data jumping from device to device around the world, enabling the creation and delivery of previously unimaginable products and services made of that data.

Foundational Platforms vs. Market Fragmentation

XML is a relatively open-ended data format that supports the creation of new fields of data, or namespaces, in a standardized and predictable format. The W3C says XML standards are "omnipresent in enterprise computing and are a part of the foundation of the Web." RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is one of many forms of XML, as is XLRB, the XML data format for business data. The standardization of these formats allows data to be shared easily across different applications and devices, without the challenges of translating data from proprietary formats.

The W3C says it's been clear for years that in low memory or low bandwidth situations, basic XML carried too high a cost for data transmission. "Market demand led to the proliferation of application-specific approaches," the Consortium said today, "but most were neither efficient nor general enough, and they sacrificed the interoperability that makes XML so valuable."

To adress that fragmentation of standards, the W3C brought together a wide variety of organizations seeking advances upon XML in industries ranging from smart electrical grids to defense technology to consumer devices.

The editing of the EXI standard has been lead by John Schneier, CTO of a company called AgileDelta, which has been offering EXI-based products for seven years. "They've achieved over 100-fold performance improvements and expanded their data networks to high speed aircraft, automobiles, mobile devices and sensor networks," Schneier says of technologies leveraging EXI. "At the same time, they've achieved dramatic cost savings by using open Web standards and off-the-shelf products in place of the custom protocols, gateways and applications previously required by these applications."

You can learn more about EXI at the W3C's website.

And rightly so, perhaps, as Philippe Le Hégaret, the person who oversees the W3C's work on HTML5, has written a blog post clarifying the results of these tests, urging people to not draw any conclusions about "whether one browser or another is better."

Le Hégaret admits that the test report page was misleading, and the page now features a giant red box, clarifying that the tests are a work-in-progress. But he also adds, "the report is still bogus... and the percentages are incorrect," something that raises questions not just about whether or not IE9 is HTML5 compliant, but about how the W3C is testing and reporting these specifications.

Le Hégaret does call for more community participation in helping the W3C with the testing, something that hopefully help move HTML5 - the proposed standard and the testing process - forward.

And in a side-by-side comparison of Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome 7, Firefox 4 beta 6, Opera 10.6, and Safari 5.0, the tests found that the most compliant browser currently available is IE9.

The numbers show that IE9 doesn't score perfectly in these areas. But all told, it gives a better showing than Chrome, trouncing the latter in the "xhtml5" spec.

Being at the forefront of comformance with the not-yet-official HTML5 standards challenges the IE9's reputation as the bane of web development. As The Register notes, "we can still marvel at just how much Microsoft's browser philosophy has changed in recent months." Whether the new philosophy and better compliance in these tests will help IE9 win back developers remains to be seen.

HTML5 is all the rage. Everyone from mobile developers to Apple CEO Steve Jobs to Google CEO Eric Schmidt have backed the standard as the future. Everyone, that is, except for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the official standards organization of the Web.

An official for the W3C is calling for developers to hold off on all the HTML5, saying it's a bit too early for the Flash-killer to be let loose on the general public.

According to Le Hegaret, the basic issue is getting HTML5 to operate the same in different browsers and using different video devices. He also noted that HTML5 currently lacks a video codec and digital rights management capabilities, which he said he does not expect to have in the upcoming specification.

The HTML5 specification should be "feature-complete by mid-2011," he told InfoWorld, noting that we shouldn't expect the death of Flash "anytime soon."

Webinos' end goal is to create a framework for Web applications across mobile, PC, home media (TV) and even in-car devices which doesn't require the apps to be reprogrammed for each platform.

Already the project has support from several industry giants, including EU operators like Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), Spain's Telefonica and Telecom Italia, hardware makers Samsung and Sony Ericsson and standards body the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

According to the project's homepage, webinos "will define and deliver an Open Source Platform and software components for the Future Internet in the form of web runtime extensions, to enable web applications and services to be used and shared consistently and securely over a broad spectrum of converged and connected devices."

In other words, webinos goes beyond simply touting the Web and its coding language, HTML, as the standard for apps, and instead wants to develop a common set of APIs (APIs, or application programming interfaces, are developer tools) that would allow applications to run in a Web environment. To do so, webinos offers a single "virtual" device that can consist of all the devices owned by a user. Services running on this platform could then take advantage of the capabilities of any given device, without having to be specifically coded for that system.

Fragmentation is Bad for Business

Project head Stephan Steglich explained to the BBC how extreme platform fragmentation is becoming a costly matter for business. "Companies can afford to have an app on two or at most three platforms," he said. "They're extremely costly to develop and ensure the user experience. That's what we want to address - to provide a system that runs on all these platforms and domains, where the developer comes up with one application for one platform and lets you run it on all these devices - mobiles, automotive, gaming, and so on."

On the mobile front, the fragmentation issue was also recently highlighted in an interview between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and tech news blog TechCrunch. The young exec admitted that the numerous platforms are even a problem for a company of Facebook's size, saying "[fragmentation is] kind of a disaster right now. I really hope that the direction that this stuff goes in is one where there's more of a standard...it's pretty hard for us to build a lot of new products and build them all for these different platforms."

Other Efforts, Little Hope?

Webinos isn't the only project attempting to address fragmentation issues, however. Earlier this year, mobile operators joined forces to create the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) project, a more commercial effort with many of the same players involved. WAC is reportedly doing much of the same thing as Webinos, and is also collaborating with the W3C on its efforts.

Unfortunately, despite the big name participants and funding, some industry insiders are doubtful that Webinos will be able to revolutionize anything. The BBC cited content delivery provider Saffron Digital's chief, Shashi Fernando, as saying that there is no interest in standardization of platforms because companies need to differentiate their product. He specifically called out Apple as the "big bear in the room," who won't likely participate in these efforts.

That said, even if Apple remained a holdout going forward, a semi-universal standard holds promise. And the more bodies that participate in the effort, the better for developers, business and end users alike.

"It's been exciting to see font designers and vendors come together with browser developers and other industry experts to create a standard that will open up new typographic possibilities for web authors," says Jonathan Kew of Mozilla. "I anticipate that in the coming few years, the Web will be greatly enriched by the availability of a wide range of high-quality typefaces for many languages and all kinds of design needs."

Language support is just one of the many benefits of expanded font choice on the Web aside from making text prettier, clearer and in-line with branding. Since unique typefaces require the use of images to be displayed properly across the Web, the text is largely invisible to search engines. Removing the crutch of image-based typography will have a significant impact on to improving typographic search engine optimization (SEO).

Eliminating typographic images also opens to the door to increased accessibility to the blind, who rely on text-to-speech programs. Members of the Web Fonts Working Group will be participating in a panel discussion on the WOFF at the end of the week at TypeCon 2010 - a conference for typographic enthusiasts. If the current state of testing and interest says anything, we could see a much broader set of fonts throughout the Web very soon.

Photo by Flickr user stevekeys.

That same desire to have our data at any time doesn't influence mobile development as much because our phones are portable and are already with us all day. Web apps for mobile will instead have to rely on other ways to attract users away from native applications. To do that they will first need strength in numbers, and that means attracting developers, and as Amirzada explained, there are several reasons developers should be excited about mobile Web development.

Attracting the Mobile App Developers

The first is the simplicity of the coding itself. Experienced Web developers are more likely to pick up mobile Web development than, say, iPhone app development. Developers can use HTML, CSS and JavaScript to create Web apps instead of learning new languages to code native applications. Native app development may not be the hardest of tasks from a developer's point of view, but Web development is a skill they have likely already mastered and are adept at.

Secondly, as Amirzada pointed out, the mobile Web market is much larger than native applications markets. By coding for the mobile Web, app developers can reach a broader audience on multiple devices and platforms in a single stroke. Platforms like iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile (which all use unique languages and techniques to develop applications) only represent a fraction of the overall mobile device market, while the mobile Web is accessible from a much larger number of handsets.

The third and possibly most important reason developers should be attracted to mobile Web apps is that the Web is an open platform. Developers don't have to spend weeks on an application only to see it rejected for increasingly strange reasons. Steve Jobs can't censor the Web like he can the iPhone, and there is no waiting for applications to be approved.

Hurdles to Overcome

Unfortunately for mobile Web app fans, these benefits also come with equal and opposite disadvantages. While coding for the Web may be simpler than creating native apps, the native platforms allow the apps to take advantage of the device's functions and features. From a user perspective, native apps are more appealing because of this. I would rather use an app that felt like it belonged on my phone rather than use a Web app that seems shoehorned onto my device through HTML.

Another problem with Web apps is their performance when compared to native apps, which are streamlined to run as efficiently as they can on the device they are designed for. Amirzada said that this is changing, however, as HTML5 improves on the infrastructure of the Web and makes applications faster and more functional.

He also demonstrated how using open-source JavaScript frameworks, like Cappuccino, on Qualcomm's Brew mobile platform can give developers access to various device sensors to create richer Web-based mobile apps. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is also working on bringing mobile Web apps up to speed by creating a standard for Web-based push notifications.

But the question still remains - will mobile Web apps one day outpace native applications? The largest push in this direction seems to be the openness of the Web, as closed platforms have turned many developers away from popular native platforms like the iPhone and iPad. But those developers could just switch to Android or Windows Mobile. Once we reach a point where mobile devices have the computing power of our desktop machines, mobile Web apps could make a run on native apps, but that is still likely a few years out.

Let us know what you think about mobile apps versus native apps in the comments below!

Disclosure: Qualcomm covered the author's travel costs to attend Uplinq 2010.

Unfortunately, there's not one standard way to easily code these notifications across platforms and there's very little support for web apps seeking to send notifications to users. It's been one of the advantages that desktop apps have had over the web. That could be about to change.

The Group has published an Editor's Draft for the specification and it's a good read. The possible implementations accounted for today could be the foundation of vital new features the web apps we use and build tomorrow.

Want a web-based Twitter client with popup desktop messages? A web-based banking app with push alerts to mobile devices? There are a whole lot of possibilities when you imagine combining the advantages of the web with a cross-platform standard for notification APIs.

What's Included

Alerts like this are generally only possible for desktop apps. Michael Richardson, engineer at Urban Airship, a company that pushes rich media mobile notifications as a service for developers, put it like this:

"Anybody familiar with OS X and Growl has been using things like this for a while. One thing modern desktop notification systems are missing is a standard that allows better communication between web apps and users in front of their computer. Previously, the only method has been email, which sucks. This will be a good step towards promoting web applications as first class citizens."

The W3C draft spec discusses a snooze button for alerts, external device notifications and "simultaneous execution contexts (like a multi-tab email application) to show notifications without creating duplicate notifications." For web apps!

Behind the Scenes

The Working Group is slated to work until the end of January 2012 and is chaired by a 23 year old Dutch engineer from Opera named Anne van Kesteren (@annevk). The draft spec was edited by John Gregg, a Microsoft-turned-Google software engineer who led development of the Webkit desktop notifications API that Chrome recently made accessible to extension developers. Discussion of the web notifications standard will occur over a public email list that appears not to have been initiated yet.

This should be one to watch; this could be a key group in building a foundation for the real-time web user interfaces of the future.

Thanks to Palm's Dion Almaer for being the first within our circle to mention this.

Philippe Le Hegaret, the interaction domain leader for the W3C, talked about this issue in an interview with WebMonkey's Michael Calore.

According to Le Hegaret, video support is still one of the main issues surrounding the development of HTML5. Safari and Chrome are both based on the same open-source WebKit engine. Video support, however, is not part of WebKit yet, so every vendor implements it differently. Currently, browser developer disagree over how to implement this feature and what codec to use. Apple wants to use uses H.264 and Mozilla, Google and Opera support Ogg Theora. As of now, HTML5 still includes the <video> tag, but doesn't specify which codec to use.

Transition from Plugins

Until these issues are sorted out, users will have to continue to rely on plugins. Of course, the only way to do away with video plugins would be to make sure that every online video provider also adopted this new standard. As Le Hegaret rightly points out in the interview with WebMonkey, people don't like to install plugins, but everybody installs the Flash plugin because "if you can't see YouTube, your life on the web is pretty miserable. You're missing a lot." Le Hegaret acknowledges that there has to be a transition period before users can switch from Flash to HTML5 video.

For developers, the fact that the video is not running in a plugin that can't talk to the browser is a major advantage of having built-in video support in the browser. With video in HTML5, developers can connect the video to the rest of the page and have actions on the page or video influence other parts of the site.

What About Microsoft?

At today's PDC keynote, Microsoft noted that it has to improve support for HTML5 in its browser. While the company didn't say a lot about Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft candidly acknowledged that it has to improve JavaScript performance as well. After only a few weeks of development on IE9, the company is already matching the performance of the latest beta versions of Firefox and Chrome.

If you want to learn more about HTML5, also have a look at this story: 5 Exciting Things to Look Forward to in HTML5.

In Part 2 we discuss: how previously reticent search engines like Google and Yahoo have begun to participate in the Semantic Web in 2009, user interfaces for browsing and using data, what Tim Berners-Lee thinks of new computational engine Wolfram Alpha, how e-commerce vendors are moving into the Linked Data world, and finally how the Internet of Things intersects with the Semantic Web.

RWW: You've been talking about the Semantic Web for many years now. Generally the view is that Semantic Web is great in theory, but we're still not seeing a large number of commercial web apps that use RDF (we've seen a number of scientific or academic ones). However we have begun to see some traction with RDFa (embedding RDF metadata into XHTML Web content), for example Google's Rich Snippets and Yahoo's SearchMonkey. Has the takeup of RDFa taken you by surprise?

TBL: Not really, but the takeup by the search engines is interesting. In a way I was happy to see that, it was a milestone for those things to come out of the search engines. The search engines had typically not been keen on the Semantic Web - maybe you could argue that their business is making order out of chaos, and they're actually happy with the chaos. And if you provide them with the order, they don't immediately see the use of it.

Also I think there was misunderstanding in the search engine industry that the Semantic Web meant metadata, and metadata meant keywords, and keywords don't work because people lie. Because traditionally in information retrieval systems, keywords haven't proven up to the task of finding stuff on the Web. One of the reasons is that people lie, the other is that they can't be bothered to enter keywords. So keywords have gotten a bad reputation, then metadata in general was tarred with this 'keywords don't work' brush. Because a lot of Semantic Web data included metadata, then people thought that with Semantic Web data -- again, that people will lie and won't have the time to produce it.

Google rich snippets example; image credit: Matt Cutts

Now I think there's a realization that when you're putting data online, that people are motivated NOT to lie. For example when your band is going to produce its next album, or when your band is going to play next downtown, you're motivated to put that information up there on the Semantic Web. There's an awful lot of cases when actually data is really important to people; and it's on the web anyway. So I think it's great that some of the search engine companies are starting to read RDFa.

Does this mean that they [search engines] will start to absorb the whole RDF data model? If they do, then they will be able to start pulling all of the linked data cloud in.

Will they know what to do with it? Because when it's data in a very organized form, I think some people have been misunderstanding the Semantic Web as being something that tries to make a better search engine - i.e. when you type something into a little box. But of course the great thing about the Semantic Web is that you can query it, you can ask a complicated query of the Semantic Web, like a SQL query (we call it a SPARQL query), and that's such a different thing to be able to do. It really doesn't compare to a search engine.

You've got search for text phrases on one side (which is a useful tool) and querying of the data on the other. I think that those things will connect together a lot.

So I think people will search using a search text engine, and find a webpage. On the front of the webpage they'll find a link to some data, then they'll browse with a data browser, then they'll find a pattern which is really interesting, then they'll make their data system go and find all the things which are like that pattern (which is actually doing a query, but they'll not realize it), then they'll be in data mode with tables and doing statistical analysis, and in that statistical analysis they'll find an interesting object which has a home page, and they'll click on that, and go to a homepage and be back on the Web again.

So the web of linked data and the web of documents actually connect in both directions, with links.

User Interfaces for Semantic Content

RWW: At the recent SemTech conference, Tom Tague of Thomson Reuters' Calais project suggested that user interfaces for semantic content are key in getting more take-up. With that in mind, I wonder if you've seen some great interfaces or designs for semantic applications in recent months - if so which ones and why did they impress you?

TBL: I think that whole area is very exciting at the moment. The only piece of hacking I've done over the past few years has been on a thing called the Tabulator [a data browser and editor], which is addressing exactly that. Partly because I wanted to be able to look at this data. And now there are lots of different ways that people need to be able to look at data. You need to be able to browse through it piece by piece, exploring the world of data. You need to be able to look for patterns of particular things that have happened. Because this is data, we need to be able to use all of the power that traditionally we've used for data. When I've pulled in my chosen data set, using a query, I want to be able to do [things like] maps, graphs, analysis, and statistical stuff.

W3C Tabulator, a data browser/editor; Image credit: wiwiss.fu-berlin.de

So when you talk about user interfaces for this, it's really very very broad. Yes I think it's important. There's also the distinction we can make between the generic interfaces and the specific interfaces.

There will always be specific interfaces; for example if you're looking at calendar data, there's nothing else like a calendar that understands weeks, months and years. If you're looking at a genome, it's good to have a genetics-specific user interface.

However you also need to be able to connect that data, through generic interfaces. So if my genome data was taken during an experiment which happened over a particular period, I need to be able to look at that in the calendar - so I can connect the genetics to the calendar.

So one of the things I hope to see is domain-specific things for various different domains, and the generic user interfaces. And hopefully the generic interfaces will be able to tie together all of the domains.

Next Page: Wolfram Alpha; e-Commerce and Linked Data

Wolfram Alpha and Natural Language Interfaces

RWW: An interesting new product was launched this year called Wolfram|Alpha, described as a 'computational knowledge engine.' It's kind of a mix between Google (search) and Wikipedia (knowledge), and its key attribute is that enables you to compute something. The founders think that 'computing' things on the fly is something we're going to see a lot of in future. What's your take on Wolfram|Alpha?

TBL: There are two parts to that sort of technology. One of them is a sort of stilted natural language interface. We've seen those sort of natural language queries for years. Boris Katz [from W3C] created a system called START [a software system designed to answer questions that are posed to it in natural language]. I think with the Semantic Web out there, those sorts of interfaces are going to become important, very valuable, because people will be able to ask more complicated things. The search engine has traditionally been limited to just a phrase, but some of the search engines are now starting to realize that if they put data behind them and have computation engines, then you can ask things like 'what's this many pounds in dollars?' and so on. So yes, those interfaces will become important.

Conversational interfaces have always been a really interesting avenue. We've had voice browser work in W3C, that has been an interesting alternative avenue. It's possible that as compute power goes up, we'll see a prolifieration of machines capable of doing voice. It'll move from the mainframe to being able to run on a laptop or your phone. As that happens, we'll get actual voice recognition and pattern natural language at the front end. That will perhaps be an important part of the Semantic Web.

We talked before about what a great challenge the Semantic Web is going to be from a user interface point of view. Conversational interfaces are going to be part of [solving] that. Of course it's also going to be really valuable to have compositional interfaces - for the visually impaired and so on.

Wolfram|Alpha is also a large curated database of data sets. Obviously I'm interested in the big data set which is out there, which is Linked Data. This everybody can connect to. I don't really know a lot about the internals of Wolfram|Alpha's data set. I don't know whether they're likely to put any of it out on the web as Linked Data - that might be an interesting addition. I imagine that quite a lot of it may have come from the web of Linked Data.

e-Commerce and Linked Data

RWW: There have been reports recently that both Google and Yahoo will be supporting the Good Relations ontology and linked data for e-commerce. Companies such as Best Buy are already putting out product information in RDFa. What would be your advice to e-commerce vendors right now, to help them transition to this world of structured data on the Web. The same question could be asked across many verticals, but e-commerce seems like one area which has some momentum right now. Would you advise them just to put out their data as Linked Data?

TBL: Yup! Certainly this year is the year to do it. I've been advising governments to do it and when you look at an enterprise, you find that a lot of the issues are the same. But when you put your data from government or enterprise out there, make sure you don't disturb existing ecosystems. Don't threaten those systems, because you've spent years building them up.

Maybe there's an analogy with when the Web first started and the first bookshops went online. They were more or less a flyer, saying 'hey we have a great bookshop at 23 Main St, come on down!'. Let's say that a person named Joe owned one of these early online bookshops. If somebody had suggested to Joe that he should put his catalog online, Joe would've felt that that was very proprietary data. And he'd be worried that other bookshops would see where he was weak, so they'd be able to advertise themselves as filling that niche he's weak in.

But when his competitors Fred and Albert put their catalogs online, then Joe can check which books people are browsing at Fred and Albert's websites. So Joe would [finally] be pursuaded to put his book catalog up online. But he doesn't put up the prices... until Albert and/or Fred does. And even if catalog and pricing is up there, nobody puts their stock levels online. And there was a period of time when nobody [i.e. online booksellers] had their stock levels up. But people got fed up with ordering stuff that wasn't in stock. So the first book shop to actually tell you about stock levels suddenly was then unbelievably attractive to its customers.

So there's this syndrome of progressive competitive disclosure. This happens when people realize that if you're going to do business with somebody, if you're going to have your partners up and down the supply chain, really it's useful to check the data web - and life goes much more quickly and open.

Best Buy may be what starts the ball rolling [among e-commerce vendors]. Now if I want to look out for what [products are] available, I can write a program to see what there is. If somebody wants to compete with Best Buy, to my program they'll be invisible unless they can get their data up in RDF. Doesn't matter whether they use RDFa or RDF XML, as long as it maps in a standard fashion to the RDF model, then they will be visible.

Next Page: Internet of Things; Conclusion

The Internet of Things

RWW: I'm fascinated by how the Internet is becoming more and more integrated into the real world. For example the Internet of Things, where everyday objects become Internet connected via sensors. Have you been following this trend closely too, and if so what impact do you think this will have on the Web in say 5 years time?

TBL: It connects very much with Semantic Web [and] with linked data. With Linked Data you've got the ability to give a thing a URI. So I can give a URI to my phone, and I can say that's my phone in Linked Data. And also the company that made it can give a URI to the model of the phone. They can also put online all the specs of the phone, and then I can make a link to say that my phone is an example of that product. So now any system which is dealing with me and has access to that data will be able to figure out the sorts of things I can do with my phone, which actually is really valuable. Especially if the phone breaks.

The Semantic Web has already given URIs to things, and to types of things. When the things themselves have an RFID chip in them, then I think it's a very exciting world. One can take that RFID chip, go to the Internet and find out the data about the thing. Whether we'll be able to do that, whether the manufacturers will be open enough to allow me to turn data about the identifier of the thing into data about the thing, is yet to be seen. But it's a very exciting idea.

Pachube, an example of the Internet of Things (see ReadWriteWeb profile)

Similarly, I'd like to be able to scan a barcode and get back nutritional information about what's in - for example - a can of food. But we don't have that yet. To get that sort of thing, which is very powerful, we need to build look-up systems, which allow you to translate an RFID code or a barcode into an HTTP address.

The Semantic Web is a web of things, conceptually. Tying an actual thing down to a part of the web is the last link - the last mile. Give the thing a notion of its own identity in the web.

Conclusion

RWW: The over-riding message in both Part 1 and 2 of our interview with Tim Berners-Lee, is for companies and organizations to make their data available online. Preferably as Linked Data, which uses a subset of Semantic Web technologies. But Berners-Lee noted, in Part 1 of our interview, that he'd even be happy with the data in CSV (comma separated values) format.

It's clear that we've seen a lot of progress in linked data already in 2009. In upcoming posts on ReadWriteWeb, we'll continue to track this trend and explain how organizations can contribute their data.

This was my first meeting with the Web's creator, whose work and philosophy was a direct inspiration for me when I launched ReadWriteWeb back in 2003.¹

Note: the interview will be published in two parts, with Part 1 today on the topic of Linked Data. Part 2 will explore other topics and will run tomorrow.

UPDATE: Part 2 of this interview is now available.

How Linked Data Relates to The Semantic Web

RWW: Earlier this year you gave an inspiring talk at TED about Linked Data. You described Linked Data as a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself - i.e. we've gone from a Web of documents to a Web of data. Can you please explain though how Linked Data relates to the Semantic Web, is it a subset of it?

TBL: They fit in completely, in that the linked data actually uses a small slice of all the various technologies that people have put together and standardized for the Semantic Web.

We started off with the Semantic Web roadmap, which had lots of languages that we wanted to create. [However] the community as a whole got a bit distracted from the idea that actually the most important piece is the interoperability of the data. The fact that things are identified with URIs is the key thing.

The Semantic Web and Linked Data connect because when we've got this web of linked data, there are already lots of technologies which exist to do fancy things with it. But it's time now to concentrate on getting the web of linked data out there.

Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and ReadWriteWeb founder Richard MacManus

How Linked Data Has Evolved via Grassroots

RWW: Linked Data has had a lot of grassroots support, which you mentioned in your TED speech. This is something Semantic Web technologies, such as RDF, have struggled to get over the years. Has the W3C been pushing the more bottom-up Linked Data world, because of the frustration over lack of take-up of top-down Semantic Web?

TBL: A lot of the initial RDF and OWL projects came out of the academic world; and some of them were projects to show what you could do in a closed world. And the files were zipped up and left on a disc. While they were interesting projects, and while the systems were useful systems, the semantic web community maybe missed the point of the 'web' bit and focused too much on the 'semantic'. However the work that's been done in the Semantic Web, the standards, was really valuable. It's relatively recently for example that SPARQL [an RDF query language] has been developed.

Somebody drew an analogy the other day: can you imagine trying to promote a world of databases without SQL? Even though it's not an interoperable protocol, it's just a query language. So similarly, all that's been put into RDF, rdfs and OWL is very valuable to the linked data community.

The Linked Data community tend to use a subset of that [Semantic Web technologies], of OWL for example. But they certainly use SPARQL. So you could argue that really it wasn't ready to be deployed widely.

Linked Data started as a very informal Design Issues note that I put in; it was a grassroots movement from very early on. So yes W3C has been emphasizing the importance of Linked Data. It's been the Semantic Web Interest Group of course, and various [other Semantic Web] activities, which has been pushing it. But also Linked Data has been seized on - a group of people for example put together DBpedia.³ That wasn't commissioned, that was that they just thought it would be a really cool idea.

Graph of Linked Data sets on the Web, as at March 2009

Linked Data and Governments

RWW: In a recent Design Issues note, you urge governments to put their data online as Linked Data (although you'd also be happy for governments to just make available the raw data - presumably so that others can then structure it). What do you realistically expect, for example, the U.S. or U.K. governments to do over the next year? And in the near future, do you foresee different governments interconnecting their Linked Data sets?

TBL: One can't generalize, governments are (like most big organizations) fascinatingly diverse inside them. So you'll find that there are places inside governments where you get a champion who gets linked data and who's just written a script and produced some linked data. So in the UK government for example, you'll find there's RDFa [in the code of its website] for civil service jobs. So if somebody wants to make a database of all the jobs, they can do that very easily.

There are other cases where the easiest thing for somebody to do is to just put data up in whatever form it's available. Comma separated values (CSV) files are remarkably popular. They're exported sometimes from spreadsheets. It's remarkable how much information is in spreadsheets. Or sometimes pulled out of a database and then put up on the web. It's not as good, not as useful to the community, as if Linked Data had been put up there and linked. But the first step of actually putting the data out there is the one that nobody else can do.

Data.gov, a catalog of public data, was launched in May by the U.S. government

The way to go is for government departments to go the extra step and convert [their data] into Linked Data. One of the nice things about Linked Data, when they have a pile of it, is that they could run a SPARQL server on it. SPARQL servers are a commodity product, a solution for all of the people who say 'but actually I wanted to have XML.' A SPARQL server will generate an XML file [and] allow somebody to write out, effectively, a URL for the XML file.

In fact, I don't see why SPARQL servers shouldn't provide CSV files, something which as far as I know isn't in the standards. But I'd recommend it, certainly in government context, because CSV files are what people have and what people want.

So the message [for government] is to use RDF. Linked Data is the backplane, it's the thing that you connect to in both directions. As a [web] producer your job is to make sure that you produce Linked Data one way or another. And as a consumer, there are lots of ways to consume that data once it's out there as Linked Data.

In Part 2 of this interview we discuss: how previously reticent search engines like Google and Yahoo have begun to participate in the Semantic Web in 2009, user interfaces for browsing and using data, what Tim Berners-Lee thinks of new computational engine Wolfram Alpha, how e-commerce vendors are moving into the Linked Data world, and finally how the Internet of Things intersects with the Semantic Web. Read Part 2 here.

Footnotes:

1. The very first sentence written on this blog, on 20 April, 2003, was: "The World Wide Web in 2003 is beginning to fulfill the hopes that Tim Berners-Lee had for it over 10 years ago when he created it."

2. For more on read/write browsers, you can read another early RWW post entitled What became of the Browser/Editor.

3. DBpedia is a community project to extract structured information from Wikipedia; see ReadWriteWeb's profile of this and similar resources.