text:
If you are interested in semantics, taxonomies, education, information overload and how libraries are evolving, you may enjoy this video of my talk on the Semantic Web and the Future of Libraries at the OCLC Symposium at the American Library Association Midwinter 2009 Conference. This event focused around a dialogue between David Weinberger and myself, moderated by Roy Tennant. We were forutnate to have an audience of about 500 very vocal library directors in the audience and it was an intensive day of thinking together. Thanks to the folks at OCLC for a terrific and really engaging event!
Tag Archives: Collaboration Tools
Twine's Explosive Growth
Twine has been growing at 50% per month since launch in October. We've been keeping that quiet while we wait to see if it holds. VentureBeat just noticed and did an article about it. It turns out our January numbers are higher than Compete.com estimates and February is looking strong too. We have a slew of cool viral features coming out in the next few months too as we start to integrate with other social networks. Should be an interesting season.
Interest Networks are at a Tipping Point
UPDATE: There's already a lot of good discussion going on around this post in my public twine.
I've been writing about a new trend that I call "interest networking" for a while now. But I wanted to take the opportunity before the public launch of Twine on Tuesday (tomorrow) to reflect on the state of this new category of applications, which I think is quickly reaching its tipping point. The concept is starting to catch on as people reach for more depth around their online interactions.
In fact – that's the ultimate value proposition of interest networks – they move us beyond the super poke and towards something more meaningful. In the long-term view, interest networks are about building a global knowledge commons. But in the short term, the difference between social networks and interest networks is a lot like the difference between fast food and a home-cooked meal – interest networks are all about substance.
At a time when social media fatigue is setting in, the news cycle is growing shorter and shorter, and the world is delivered to us in soundbytes and catchphrases, we crave substance. We go to great lengths in pursuit of substance. Interest networks solve this problem – they deliver substance.t
So, what is an interest network?
In short, if a social network is about who you are interested in, an interest network is about what you are interested in. It's the logical next step.
Twine for example, is an interest network that helps you share information with friends, family, colleagues and groups, based on mutual interests. Individual "twines" are created for content around specific subjects. This content might include bookmarks, videos, photos, articles, e-mails, notes or even documents. Twines may be public or private and can serve individuals, small groups or even very large groups of members.
I have also written quite a bit about the Semantic Web and the Semantic Graph, and Tim Berners-Lee has recently started talking about what he calls the GGG (Giant Global Graph). Tim and I are in agreement that social networks merely articulate the relationships between people. Social networks do not surface the equally, if not more important, relationships between people and places, places and organizations, places and other places, organization and other organizations, organization and events, documents and documents, and so on.
This is where interest networks come in. It's still early days to be clear, but interest networks are operating on the premise of tapping into a multi–dimensional graph that manifests the complexity and substance of our world, and delivers the best of that world to you, every day.
We're seeing more and more companies think about how to capitalize on this trend. There are suddenly (it seems, but this category has been building for many months) lots of different services that can be viewed as interest networks in one way or another, and here are some examples:
- Twine (my site)
- Friendfeed
- Strands
- Intuu
- SocialMedian
- Zimesh
- Popego
- YourVersion
What all of these interest networks have in common is some sort of a bottom-up, user-driven crawl of the Web, which is the way that I've described Twine when we get the question about how we propose to index the entire Web (the answer: we don't.
We let our users tell us what they're most interested in, and we follow their lead).
Most interest networks exhibit the following characteristics as well:
- They have some sort of bookmarking/submission/markup function to store and map data (often using existing metaphors, even if what's under the hood is new)
- They also have some sort of social sharing function to provide the network benefit (this isn't exclusive to interest networks, obviously, but it is characteristic)
- And in most cases, interest networks look to add some sort of "smarts" or "recommendations" capability to the mix (that is, you get more out than you put in)
This last bullet point is where I see next-generation interest networks really providing the most benefit over social bookmarking tools, wikis, collaboration suites and pure social networks of one kind or another.
To that end, we think that Twine is the first of a new breed of intelligent applications that really get to know you better and better over time – and that the more you use Twine, the more useful it will become. Adding your content to Twine is an investment in the future of your data, and in the future of your interests.
At first Twine begins to enrich your data with semantic tags and links to related content via our recommendations engine that learns over time. Twine also crawls any links it sees in your content and gathers related content for you automatically – adding it to your personal or group search engine for you, and further fleshing out the semantic graph of your interests which in turn results in even more relevant recommendations.
The point here is that adding content to Twine, or other next-generation interest networks, should result in increasing returns. That's a key characteristic, in fact, of the interest networks of the future – the idea that the ratio of work (input) to utility (output) has no established ceiling.
Another key characteristic of interest networks may be in how they monetize. Instead of being advertising-driven, I think they will focus more on a marketing paradigm. They will be to marketing what search engines were to advertising. For example, Twine will be monetizing our rich model of individual and group interests, using our recommendation engine. When we roll this capability out in 2009, we will deliver extremely relevant, useful content, products and offers directly to users who have demonstrated they are really interested in such information, according to their established and ongoing preferences.
6 months ago, you could not really prove that "interest networking" was a trend, and certainly it wasn't a clearly defined space. It was just an idea, and a goal. But like I said, I think that we're at a tipping point, where the technology is getting to a point at which we can deliver greater substance to the user, and where the culture is starting to crave exactly this kind of service as a way of making the Web meaningful again.
I think that interest networks are a huge market opportunity for many startups thinking about what the future of the Web will be like, and I think that we'll start to see the term used more and more widely. We may even start to see some attention from analysts — Carla, Jeremiah, and others, are you listening?
Now, I obviously think that Twine is THE interest network of choice. After all we helped to define the category, and we're using the Semantic Web to do it. There's a lot of potential in our engine and our application, and the growing community of passionate users we've attracted.
Our 1.0 release really focuses on UE/usability, which was a huge goal for us based on user feedback from our private beta, which began in March of this year. I'll do another post soon talking about what's new in Twine. But our TOS (time on site) at 6 minutes/user (all time) and 12 minutes/user (over the last month) is something that the team here is most proud of – it tells us that Twine is sticky, and that "the dogs are eating the dog food."
Now that anyone can join, it will be fun and gratifying to watch Twine grow.
Still, there is a lot more to come, and in 2009 our focus is going to shift back to extending our Semantic Web platform and turning on more of the next-generation intelligence that we've been building along the way. We're going to take interest networking to a whole new level.
Stay tuned!
The Future of the Desktop
This is an older version of this article. The most recent version is located here:
I have spent the last year really thinking about the future of the Web. But lately I have been thinking more about the future of the desktop. In particular, here are some questions I am thinking about and some answers I've come up so far.
(Author's Note: This is a raw, first-draft of what I think it will be like. Please forgive any typos — I am still working on this and editing it…)
What Will Happen to the Desktop?
As we enter the third decade of the Web we are seeing an increasing shift from local desktop applications towards Web-hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS). The full range of standard desktop office tools (word processors, spreadsheets, presentation tools, databases, project management, drawing tools, and more) can now be accessed as Web-hosted apps within the browser. The same is true for an increasing range of enterprise applications. This process seems to be accelerating.
As more kinds of applications become available in Web-based form, the Web browser is becoming the primary framework in which end-users work and interact. But what will happen to the desktop? Will it too eventually become a Web-hosted application? Will the Web browser swallow up the desktop? Where is the desktop headed?
Is the desktop of the future going to just be a web-hosted version of the same old-fashioned desktop metaphors we have today?
No. There have already been several attempts at doing this — and they never catch on. People don't want to manage all their information on the Web in the same interface they use to manage data and apps on their local PC.
Partly this is due to the difference in user experience between using files and folders on a local machine and doing that in "simulated" fashion via some Flash-based or HTML-based imitation of a desktop. Imitations desktops to-date have simply been clunky and slow imitations of the real-thing at best. Others have been overly slick. But one thing they all have in common: None of them have nailed it. The desktop of the future – what some have called "the Webtop" – still has yet to be invented.
It's going to be a hosted web service
Is the desktop even going to exist anymore as the Web becomes increasingly important? Yes, there will have to be some kind of interface that we consider to be our personal "home" and "workspace" — but ultimately it will have to be a unified space that all our devices connect to and share. This requires that it be a hosted online service.
Currently we have different information spaces on different devices (laptop, mobile device, PC). These will merge. Native local clients could be created for various devices, but ultimately the simplest and therefore most likely choice is to just use the browser as the client. This coming "Webtop" will provide an interface to your local devices, applications and information, as well as to your online life and information.
Today we think of our Web browser running inside our desktop as an applicaiton. But actually it will be the other way around in the future: Our desktop will run inside our browser as an application.
Instead of the browser running inside, or being launched from, some kind of next-generation desktop web interface technology, it's will be the other way around: The browser will be the shell and the desktop application will run within it either as a browser add-in, or as a web-based application.
The Web 3.0 desktop is going to be completely merged with the Web — it is going to be part of the Web. In fact there may eventually be no distinction between the desktop and the Web anymore.
The focus shifts from information to attention
As our digital lives shift from being focused on the old fashioned desktop to the Web environment we will see a shift from organizing information spatially (directories, folders, desktops, etc.) to organizing information temporally (feeds, lifestreams, microblogs, timelines, etc.).
Instead of being just a directory, the desktop of the future is going to be more like a feed reader or social news site. The focus will be on keeping up with all the stuff flowing in and out of the user's environment. The interface will be tuned to help the user understand what the trends are, rather than just on how things are organized.
The focus will be on helping the user to manage their attention rather than just their information. This is a leap to the meta-level: A second-order desktop. Instead of just being about the information (the first-order), it is going to be about what is happening with the information (the second-order).
Users are going to shift from acting as librarians to acting as daytraders.
Our digital roles are already shifting from acting as librarians to becoming more like daytraders. In the PC era we were all focused on trying to manage the stuff on our computers — in other words, we were acting as librarians. But this is going to shift. Librarians organize stuff, but daytraders are focused on discovering and keeping track of trends. It's a very different focus and activity, and it's what we are all moving towards.
We are already spending more of our time keeping up with change and detecting trends, than on organizing information. In the coming decade the shelf-life of information is going to become vanishingly short and the focus will shift from storage and recall to real-time filtering, trend detection and prediction.
The Webtop will be more social and will leverage and integrate collective intelligence
The Webtop is going to be more socially oriented than desktops of today — it will have built-in messaging and social networking, as well as social-media sharing, collaborative filtering, discussions, and other community features.
The social dimension of our lives is becoming perhaps our most important source of information. We get information via email from friends, family and colleagues. We get information via social networks and social media sharing services. We co-create information with others in communities.
The social dimension is also starting to play a more important role in our information management and discovery activities. Instead of those activities remaining as solitary, they are becoming more communal. For example many social bookmarking and social news sites use community sentiment and collaborative filtering to help to highlight what is most interesting, useful or important.
It's going to have powerful semantic search and social search capabilities built-in
The Webtop is going to have more powerful search built-in. This search will combine both social and semantic search features. Users will be able to search their information and rank it by social sentiment (for example, "find documents about x and rank them by how many of my friends liked them.")
Semantic search will enable highly granular search and navigation of information along a potentially open-ended range of properties and relationships.
For example you will be able to search in a highly structured way — for example, search for products you once bookmarked that have a price of $10.95 and are on-sale this week. Or search for documents you read which were authored by Sue and related to project X, in the last month.
The semantics of the future desktop will be open-ended. That is to say that users as well as other application and information providers will be able to extend it with custom schemas, new data types, and custom fields to any piece of information.
Interactive shared spaces instead of folders
Forget about shared folders — that is an outmoded paradigm. Instead, the new metaphor will be interactive shared spaces.
The need for shared community space is currently being provided for online by forums, blogs, social network profile pages, wikis, and new community sites. But as we move into Web 3.0 these will be replaced by something that combines their best features into one. These next-generation shared spaces will be like blogs, wikis, communities, social networks, databases, workspaces and search engines in one.
Any group of two or more individuals will be able to participate in a shared space that connects their desktops for a particular purpose. These new shared spaces will not only provide richer semantics in the underlying data, social network, and search, but they will also enable groups to seamlessly and collectively add, organize, track, manage, discuss, distribute, and search for information of mutual interest.
The personal cloud
The future desktop will function like a "personal cloud" for users. It will connect all their identities, data, relationships, services and activities in one virtual integrated space. All incoming and outgoing activity will flow through this space. All applications and services that a user makes use of will connect to it.
The personal cloud may not have a center, but rather may be comprised of many separate sub-spaces, federated around the Web and hosted by different service-providers. Yet from an end-user perspective it will function as a seamlessly integrated service. Users will be able to see and navigate all their information and applications, as if they were in one connected space, regardless of where they are actually hosted. Users will be able to search their personal cloud from any point within it.
Open data, linked data and open-standards based semantics
The underlying data in the future desktop, and in all associated services it connects, will be represented using open-standard data formats. Not only will the data be open, but the semantics of the data – the schema – will also be defined in an open way. The emerigng Semantic Web provides a good infrastructure for enabling this to happen.
The value of open linked-data and open semantics is that data will not be held prisoner anywhere and can easily be integrated with other data.
Users will be able to seamlessly move and integrate their data, or parts of their data, in different services. This means that your Webtop might even be portable to a different competing Webtop provider someday. If and when that becomes possible, how will Webtop providers compete to add value?
It's going to be smart
One of the most important aspects of the coming desktop is that it's going to be smart. It's going to learn and help users to be more productive. Artificial intelligence is one of the key ways that competing Webtop providers will differentiate their offerings.
As you use it, it's going to learn about your interests, relationships, current activities, information and preferences. It will adaptively self-organize to help you focus your attention on what is most important to whatever context you are in.
When reading something while you are taking a trip to Milan it may organize itself to be more contextually relevant to that time, place and context. When you later return home to San Francisco it will automatically adapt and shift to your home context. When you do a lot of searches about a certain product it will realize your context and intent has to do with that product and will adapt to help you with that activity for a while, until your behavior changes.
Your desktop will actually be a semantic knowledge base on the back-end. It will encode a rich semantic graph of your information, relationships, interests, behavior and preferences. You will be able to permit other applications to access part or all of your graph to datamine it and provide you with value-added views and even automated intelligent assistance.
For example, you might allow an agent that cross-links things to see all your data: it would go and add cross links to relevant things onto all the things you have created or collected. Another agent that makes personalized buying recommendations might only get to see your shopping history across all shopping sites you use.
Your desktop may also function as a simple personal assistant at times. You will be able to converse with your desktop eventually — through a conversational agent interface. While on the road you will be able to email or SMS in questions to it and get back immediate intelligent answers. You will even be able to do this via a voice interface.
For example, you might ask, "where is my next meeting?" or "what Japanese restaurants do I like in LA?" or "What is Sue's Smith's phone number?" and you would get back answers. You could also command it to do things for you — like reminding you to do something, or helping you keep track of an interest, or monitoring for something and alerting you when it happens.
Because your future desktop will connect all the relationships in your digital life — relationships connecting people, information, behavior, prefences and applications — it will be the ultimate place to learn about your interests and preferences.
Federated, open policies and permissions
This rich graph of meta-data that comprises your future desktop will enable the next-generation of smart services to learn about you and help you in an incredibly personalized manner. It will also of course be rife with potential for abuse and privacy will be a major function and concern.
One of the biggest enabling technologies that will be necessary is a federated model for sharing meta-data about policies and permissions on data. Information that is considered to be personal and private in Web site X should be recognized and treated as such by other applications and websites you choose to share that information with. This will require a way for sharing meta-data about your policies and permissions between different accounts and applicaitons you use.
The semantic web provides a good infrastructure for building and deploying a decentralized framework for policy and privacy integration, but it has yet to be developed, let alone adopted. For the full vision of the future desktop to emerge a universally accepted standard for exchanging policy and permission data will be a necessary enabling technology.
Who is most likely to own the future desktop?
When I think about what the future desktop is going to look like it seems to be a convergence of several different kinds of services that we currently view as separate.
It will be hosted on the cloud and accessible across all devices. It will place more emphasis on social interaction, social filtering, and collective intelligence. It will provide a very powerful and extensible data model with support for both unstructured and arbitrarily structured information. It will enable almost peer-to-peer like search federation, yet still have a unified home page and user-experience. It will be smart and personalized. It will be highly decentralized yet will manage identity, policies and permissions in an integrated cohesive and transparent manner across services.
By cobbling together a number of different services that exist today you could build something like this in a decentralized fashion. Is that how the desktop of the future will come about? Or will it be a new application provided by one player with a lot of centralized market power? Or could an upstart suddently emerge with the key enabling technologies to make this possible? It's hard to predict, but one thing is certain: It will be an interesting process to watch.
Great Collective Intelligence Book; Includes a Chapter I Wrote
I highly recommend this new book on Collective Intelligence. It features chapters by a Who's Who of thinkers on Collective Intelligence, including a chapter by me about "Harnessing the Collective Intelligence of the World Wide Web."
Here is the full-text of my chapter, minus illustrations (the rest of the book is great and I suggest you buy it to have on your shelf. It's a big volume and worth the read):
My Visit to DERI — World's Premier Semantic Web Research Institute
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to visit, and speak at, the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), located in Galway, Ireland. My hosts were Stefan Decker, the director of the lab, and John Breslin who is heading the SIOC project.
DERI has become the world's premier research institute for the Semantic Web. Everyone working in the field should know about them, and if you can, you should visit the lab to see what's happening there.
Part of the National University of Ireland, Galway. With over 100 researchers focused solely on the Semantic Web, and very significant financial backing, DERI has, to my knowledge, the highest concentration of Semantic Web expertise on the planet today. Needless to say, I was very impressed with what I saw there. Here is a brief synopsis of some of the projects that I was introduced to:
- Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE) and YARS, a massively scalable triplestore. These projects are concerned with crawling and indexing the information on the Semantic Web so that end-users can find it. They have done good work on consolidating data and also on building a highly scalable triplestore architecture.
- Sindice — An API and search infrastructure for the Semantic Web. This project is focused on providing a rapid indexing API that apps can use to get their semantic content indexed, and that can also be used by apps to do semantic searches and retrieve semantic content from the rest of the Semantic Web. Sindice provides Web-scale semantic search capabilities to any semantic application or service.
- SIOC — Semantically Interlinked Online Communities. This is an ontology for linking and sharing data across online communities in an open manner, that is getting a lot of traction. SIOC is on its way to becoming a standard and may play a big role in enabling portability and interoperability of social Web data.
- JeromeDL is developing technology for semantically enabled digital libraries. I was impressed with the powerful faceted navigation and search capabilities they demonstrated.
- notitio.us. is a project for personal knowledge management of bookmarks and unstructured data.
- SCOT, OpenTagging and Int.ere.st. These projects are focused on making tags more interoperable, and for generating social networks and communities from tags. They provide a richer tag ontology and framework for representing, connecting and sharing tags across applications.
- Semantic Web Services. One of the big opportunities for the Semantic Web that is often overlooked by the media is Web services. Semantics can be used to describe Web services so they can find one another and connect, and even to compose and orchestrate transactions and other solutions across networks of Web services, using rules and reasoning capabilities. Think of this as dynamic semantic middleware, with reasoning built-in.
- eLite. I was introduced to the eLite project, a large e-learning initiative that is applying the Semantic Web.
- Nepomuk. Nepomuk is a large effort supported by many big industry players. They are making a social semantic desktop and a set of developer tools and libraries for semantic applications that are being shipped in the Linux KDE distribution. This is a big step for the Semantic Web!
- Semantic Reality. Last but not least, and perhaps one of the most eye-opening demos I saw at DERI, is the Semantic Reality project. They are using semantics to integrate sensors with the real world. They are creating an infrastructure that can scale to handle trillions of sensors eventually. Among other things I saw, you can ask things like "where are my keys?" and the system will search a network of sensors and show you a live image of your keys on the desk where you left them, and even give you a map showing the exact location. The service can also email you or phone you when things happen in the real world that you care about — for example, if someone opens the door to your office, or a file cabinet, or your car, etc. Very groundbreaking research that could seed an entire new industry.
In summary, my visit to DERI was really eye-opening and impressive. I recommend that major organizations that want to really see the potential of the Semantic Web, and get involved on a research and development level, should consider a relationship with DERI — they are clearly the leader in the space.
Powerpoint Deck: Making Sense of the Semantic Web, and Twine
Now that I have been asked by several dozen people for the slides from my talk on "Making Sense of the Semantic Web," I guess it's time to put them online. So here they are, under the Creative Commons Attribution License (you can share it with attribution this site).
You can download the Powerpoint file at the link below:
Or you can view it right here:
Enjoy! And I look forward to your thoughts and comments.
Quick Video Preview of Twine
The New Scientist just posted a quick video preview of Twine to YouTube. It only shows a tiny bit of the functionality, but it's a sneak peak.
We've been letting early beta testers into Twine and we're learning a lot from all the great feedback, and also starting to see some cool new uses of Twine. There are around 20,000 people on the wait-list already, and more joining every day. We're letting testers in slowly, focusing mainly on people who can really help us beta test the software at this early stage, as we go through iterations on the app. We're getting some very helpful user feedback to make Twine better before we open it up the world.
For now, here's a quick video preview:
A Video and an Audio Cast About Twine
Last night I saw that the video of my presentation of Twine at the Web 2.0 Summit is online. My session, "The Semantic Edge," featured Danny Hillis of Metaweb demoing Freebase, Barney Pell demoing Powerset, and myself Demoing Twine, followed by a brief panel discussion with Tim O'Reilly (in that order). It's a good panel and I recommend the video, however, the folks at Web 2.0 only filmed the presenters; they didn't capture what we were showing on our screens, so you have to use your imagination as we describe our demos.
An audio cast of one of my presentations about Twine to a reporter was also put online recently, for a more in-depth description.
What a Week!
What a week it has been for Radar Networks. We have worked so hard these last few days to get ready to unveil Twine, and it has been a real thrill to show our work and get such positive feedback and support from the industry, bloggers, the media and potential users.
We really didn't expect so much excitement and interest. In fact we've been totally overwhelmed by the response as thousands upon thousands of people have contacted us in the last 24 hours asking to join our beta, telling us how they would use Twine for their personal information management, their collaboration, their organizations, and their communities. Clearly there is such a strong and growing need out there for the kind of Knowledge Networking capabilities that Twine provides, and it's been great to hear the stories and make new connections with so many people who want our product. We love hearing about your interest in Twine, what you would use it for, what you want it to do, and why you need it! Keep those stories coming. We read them all and we really listen to them.
Today, in unveiling Twine, over five years of R&D, and contributions from dozens of core contributors, a dedicated group of founders and investors, and hundreds of supporters, advisors, friends and family, all came to fruition. As a company, and a team, we achieved an important milestone and we should all take some time to really appreciate what we have accomplished so far. Twine is a truly ambitious and pardigm-shifting product, that is not only technically profound but visually stunning — There has been so much love and attention to detail in this product.
In the last 6 months, Twine has really matured into a product, a product that solves real and growing needs (for a detailed use-case see this post). And just as our product has matured, so has our organization: As we doubled in size, our corporate culture has become tremendously more interesting, innovative and fun. I could go on and on about the cool things we do as a company and the interesting people who work here. But it's the passion, dedication and talent of this team that is most inspiring. We are creating a team and a culture that truly has the potential to become a great Silicon Valley company: The kind of company that I've always wanted to build.
Although we launched today, this is really just the beginning of the real adventure. There is still much for us to build, learn about, and improve before Twine will really accomplish all the goals we have set out for it. We have a five-year roadmap. We know this is a marathon, not a sprint and that "slow and steady wins the race." As an organization we also have much learning and growing to do. But this really doesn't feel like work — it feels like fun — because we all love this product and this company. We all wake up every day totally psyched to work on this.
It's been an intense, challenging, and rewarding week. Everyone on my team has impressed me and really been at the top of their game. Very few of us got any real sleep, and most of us went far beyond the call of duty. But we did it, and we did it well. As a company we have never cut corners, and we have always preferred to do things the right way, even if the right way is the hard way. But that pays off in the end. That is how great products are built. I really want to thank my co-founders, my team, my investors, advisors, friends, and family, for all their dedication and support.
Today, we showed our smiling new baby to the world, and the world smiled back.
And tonight , we partied!!!
Radar Networks Announces Twine.com
My company, Radar Networks, has just come out of stealth. We've announced what we've been working on all these years: It's called Twine.com. We're going to be showing Twine publicly for the first time at the Web 2.0 Summit tomorrow. There's lot's of press coming out where you can read about what we're doing in more detail. The team is extremely psyched and we're all working really hard right now so I'll be brief for now. I'll write a lot more about this later.
Gartner is Wrong about Web 3.0
I have a lot of respect for the folks at Gartner, but their recent report in which they support the term "Web 2.0" yet claim that the term "Web 3.0" is just a marketing ploy, is a bit misguided.
In fact, quite the opposite is true.
The term Web 2.0 is in fact just a marketing ploy. It has only come to have something resembling a definition over time. Because it is in fact so ill-defined, I've suggested in the past that we just use it to refer to a decade: the second decade of the Web (2000 – 2010). After all there is no actual technology that is called "Web 2.0" — at best there are a whole slew of things which this term seems to label, and many of them are design patterns, not technologies. For example "tagging" is not a technology, it is a design pattern. A tag is a keyword, a string of text — there is not really any new technology there. AJAX is also not a technology in its own right, but rather a combination of technologies and design patterns, most of which existed individually before the onset of what is called Web 2.0.
In contrast, the term Web 3.0 actually does refer to a set of new technologies, and changes they will usher in during the third decade of the Web (2010 – 2020). Chief among these is the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is actually not one technology, but many. Some of them such as RDF and OWL have been under development for years, even during the Web 2.0 era, and others such as SPARQL and GRDDL are recent emerging standards. But that is just the beginning. As the Semantic Web develops there will be several new technology pieces added to the puzzle for reasoning, developing and sharing open rule definitions, handling issues around trust, agents, machine learning, ontology development and integration, semantic data storage, retrieval and search, and many other subjects.
Essentially, the Semantic Web enables the gradual transformation of the Web into a database. This is a profound structural change that will touch every layer of Web technology eventually. It will transform database technology, CMS, CRM, enterprise middleware, systems integration, development tools, search engines, groupware, supply-chain integration, and all the other topics that Gartner covers.
The Semantic Web will manifest in several ways. In many cases it will improve applications and services we already use. So for example, we will see semantic
social networks, semantic search, semantic groupware, semantic CMS, semantic CRM, semantic
email, and many other semantic versions of apps we use today. For a specific example, take social networking. We are seeing much talk about "opening up the social graph" so that social networks are more connected and portable. Ultimately to do this right, the social graph should be represented using Semantic Web standards, so that it truly is not only open but also easily extensible and mashable with other data.
Web 3.0 is not ONLY the Semantic Web however. Other emerging technologies may play a big role as well. Gartner seems to think Virtual Reality will be one of them. Perhaps, but to be fair, VR is actually a Web 1.0 phenomenon. It's been around for a long time, and it hasn't really changed that much. In fact the folks at the MIT Media Lab were working on things that are still far ahead of Second Life, even back in the early 1990's.
So what other technologies can we expect in Web 3.0 that are actually new? I expect that we will have a big rise in "cloud computing" such as open peer-to-peer grid storage and computing capabilities on the Web — giving any application essentially as much storage and computational power as needed for free or a very low cost. In the mobile arena we will see higher bandwidth, more storage and more powerful processors in mobile devices, as well as powerful built-in speech recognition, GPS and motion sensors enabling new uses to emerge. I think we will also see an increase in the power of personalization tools and personal assistant tools that try to help users manage the complexity of their digital lives. In the search arena, we will see search engines get smarter — among other things they will start to not only answer questions, but they will accept commands such as "find me a cheap flight to NYC" and they will learn and improve as they are used. We will also see big improvements in integration and data and account portability between different Web applications. We will also see a fundamental change in the database world as databases move away from the relational model and object model, towards the associative model of data (graph databases and triplestores).
In short, Web 3.0 is about hard-core new technologies and is going to have a much greater impact on enterprise IT managers and IT systems than Web 2.0. But ironically, it may not be until Web 4.0 (2020 – 2030) that Gartner comes to this conclusion!
Knowledge Networking
I've been thinking for several years about Knowledge Networking. It's not a term I invented, it's been floating around as a meme for at least a decade or two. But recently it has started to resurface in my own work.
So what is a knowledge network? I define a knowledge network as a form of collective intelligence in which a network of people (two or more people connected by social-communication relationships) creates, organizes, and uses a collective body of knowledge. The key here is that a knowledge network is not merely a site where a group of people work on a body of information together (such as the wikipedia), it's also a social network — there is an explicit representation of a social relationship within it. So it's more like a social network than for example a discussion forum or a wiki.
I would go so far as to say that knowledge networks are the third-generation of social software. (Note this is based in-part on ideas that emerged in conversations I have had with Peter Rip, so this also his idea):
- First-generation social apps were about communication (eg.
messaging such as Email, discussion boards, chat rooms, and IM)
- Second-generation social apps were about people and content (eg. Social networks, social media sharing, user-generated content)
- Third-generation social apps are about relationships and knowledge (eg. Wikis, referral networks, question and answer systems, social recommendation systems, vertical knowledge and expertise portals, social mashup apps, and coming soon, what we're building at Radar Networks)
Just some thoughts on a Saturday morning…
Business 2.0 and BusinessWeek Articles About Radar Networks
It's been an interesting month for news about Radar Networks. Two significant articles came out recently:
Business 2.0 Magazine published a feature article about Radar Networks in their July 2007 issue. This article is perhaps the most comprehensive article to-date about what we are working on at Radar Networks, it's also one of the better articulations of the value proposition of the Semantic Web in general. It's a fun read, with gorgeous illustrations, and I highly recommend reading it.
BusinessWeek posted an article about Radar Networks on the Web. The article covers some of the background that led to my interests in collective intelligence and the creation of the company. It's a good article and covers some of the bigger issues related to the Semantic Web as a paradigm shift. I would add one or two points of clarification in addition to what was stated in the article: Radar Networks is not relying solely on software to organize the Internet — in fact, the service we will be launching combines human intelligence and machine intelligence to start making sense of information, and helping people search and collaborate around interests more productively. One other minor point related to the article — it mentions the story of EarthWeb, the Internet company that I co-founded in the early 1990's: EarthWeb's content business actually was sold after the bubble burst, and the remaining lines of business were taken private under the name Dice.com. Dice is the leading job board for techies and was one of our properties. Dice has been highly profitable all along and recently filed for a $100M IPO.
Listen to this Discussion on the Future of the Web
If you are interested in the future of the Web, you might enjoy listening to this interview with me, moderated by Dr. Paul Miller of Talis. We discuss, in-depth: the Semantic Web, Web 3.0, SPARQL, collective intelligence, knowledge management, the future of search, triplestores, and Radar Networks.
Radar Networks Profiled in Technology Review
The MIT Technology Review just published a large article on the Semantic Web and Web 3.0, in which Radar Networks, Metaweb, Joost, RealTravel and other ventures are profiled.
Is it Only Wednesday?
Is it only Wednesday? It feels like a whole week already! I've been in back-to-back VC meetings, board discussions and strategy meetings since last week. I think this must be related to the heating-up of the "Web 3.0" meme and the semantic sector in general. Perhaps it is also due to the coverage we got in the Guidewire Report and newsletter which went out to everyone who went to DEMO, and also perhaps because of some influential people in the biz have been talking about us. We've been very careful not to show our app to anyone because it does some things that are really new. We don't want to spread that around (yet). Anyway it's been pretty busy — not just for me, but for the whole team. Everyone is on full afterburners right now.
By the way — I'm really proud or product team (hope you guys are reading this)– the team has made an alpha that is not only a breakthrough on the technical level, but it also looks incredibly good too. Some of the select few who have seen our app so far have said, "the app looks beautiful" and "wow, that's amazing" etc. We've done some cool things with NLP, graph analysis, and statistics under the hood. And the GUI is also very slick. Probably the best team I've worked with.
If you are interested in helping to beta-test the consumer Semantic Web, We're planning on doing invite-only beta trials this summer — sign up at our website to be on our beta invite list.
Breaking the Collective IQ Barrier — Making Groups Smarter
I've been thinking since 1994 about how to get past a fundamental barrier to human social progress, which I call "The Collective IQ Barrier." Most recently I have been approaching this challenge in the products we are developing at my stealth venture, Radar Networks.
In a nutshell, here is how I define this barrier:
The Collective IQ Barrier: The potential collective intelligence of a human group is exponentially proportional to group size, however in practice the actual collective intelligence that is achieved by a group is inversely proportional to group size. There is a huge delta between potential collective intelligence and actual collective intelligence in practice. In other words, when it comes to collective intelligence, the whole has the potential to be smarter than the sum of its parts, but in practice it is usually dumber.
Why does this barrier exist? Why are groups generally so bad at tapping the full potential of their collective intelligence? Why is it that smaller groups are so much better than large groups at innovation, decision-making, learning, problem solving, implementing solutions, and harnessing collective knowledge and intelligence?
I think the problem is technological, not social, at its core. In this article I will discuss the problem in more depth and then I will discuss why I think the Semantic Web may be the critical enabling technology for breaking through the Collective IQ Barrier.
The Effective Size of Groups
For millions of years — in fact since the dawn of humanity — humansocial organizations have been limited in effective size. Groups aremost effective when they are small, but they have less collectiveknowledge at their disposal. Slightly larger groups optimize both effectiveness and access to resources such as knowledge and expertise. In my own experience working on many different kinds of teams, I think that the sweet-spot is between 20and 50 people. Above this size groups rapidly become inefficient andunproductive.
The Invention of Hierarchy
The solution that humans have used to get around this limitation in the effective size of groups is hierarchy.When organizations grow beyond 50 people we start to break them intosub-organizations of less than 50 people. As a result if you look atany large organization, such as a Fortune 100 corporation, you find ahuge complex hierarchy of nested organizations and cross-functionalorganizations. This hierarchy enables the organization to createspecialized "cells" or "organs" of collective cognition aroundparticular domains (like sales, marketing, engineering, HR, strategy,etc.) that remain effective despite the overall size of theorganization.
By leveraging hierarchy an organization of even hundreds ofthousands of members can still achieve some level of collective IQ as awhole. The problem however is that the collective IQ of the wholeorganization is still quite a bit lower than the combined collectiveIQ's of the sub-organizations that comprise it. Even in well-structured, well-managed hierarchies, the hierarchy is still less thanthe sum of it's parts. Hierarchy also has limits — the collective IQof an organization is also inversely proportional to the number ofgroups it contains, and the average number of levels of hierarchybetween those groups (Perhaps this could be defined more elegantly asan inverse function of the average network distance between groups inan organization).
The reason that organizations today still have to make suchextensive use of hierarchy is that our technologies for managingcollaboration, community, knowledge and intelligence on a collectivescale are still extremely primitive. Hierarchy is still one of the only and best solutions we have at our disposal. But we're getting better fast.
Modern organizations are larger and far more complex than ever would have beenpractical in the Middle Ages, for example. They contain more people,distributed more widely around the globe, with more collaboration andspecialization, and more information, making more rapid decisions, thanwas possible even 100 years ago. This is progress.
Enabling Technologies
There have beenseveral key technologies that made modern organizations possible: the printing press,telegraph, telephone, automobile, airplane, typewriter, radio,television, fax machine, and personal computer. These technologies haveenabled information and materials to flow more rapidly, at less cost,across ever more widely distributed organizations. So we can see that technology does make a big difference in organizational productivity. The question is, can technology get us beyond the Collective IQ Barrier?
The advent of the Internet, and in particular the World Wide Webenabled a big leap forward in collective intelligence. These technologies havefurther reduced the cost to distributing and accessing information andinformation products (and even "machines" in the form of software codeand Web services). They have made it possible for collectiveintelligence to function more rapidly, more dynamically, on a wider scale, and at lesscost, than any previous generation of technology.
As a result of evolution of the Web we have seen new organizationalstructures begin to emerge that are less hierarchical, moredistributed, and often more fluid. For example, virtual teams that caninstantly form, collaborate across boundaries, and then dissolve backinto the Webs they come from when their job is finished. Thisprocess is now much easier than it ever was. Numerous hosted Web-basedtools exist to facilitate this: email, groupware, wikis, messageboards, listservers, weblogs, hosted databases, social networks, searchportals, enterprise portals, etc.
But this is still just the cusp of this trend. Even today with thecurrent generation of Web-based tools available to us, we are still notable to effectively tap much more of the potential Collective IQ of ourgroups, teams and communities. How do we get from where we are today(the whole is dumber than the sum of its parts) to where we want to bein the future (the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts)?
The Future of Productivity
The diagram below illustrates how I think about the past, present and future of productivity. In my view, from the advent of PC's onwards we have seen a rapid growth in individual and group productivity, enabling people to work with larger sets of information, in larger groups. But this will not last — soon as we reach a critical level of information and groups of ever larger size, productivity will start to decline again, unless new technologies and tools emerge to enable us to cope with these increases in scale and complexity. You can read more about this diagram here.
In the last 20 years the amount of information that knowledgeworkers (and even consumers) have to deal with on a daily basis has mushroomed by a factor of almost 10orders of magnitude and it will continue like this for several moredecades. But our information tools — and particular our tools forcommunication, collaboration, community, commerce and knowledgemanagement — have not advanced nearly as quickly. As a result thetools that we are using today to manage our information andinteractions are grossly inadequate for the task at hand: They were simply not designed tohandle the tremendous volumes of distributed information, and the rate of change ofinformation, that we are witnessing today.
Case in point: Email. Email was never designed for what it is beingused for today. Email was a simple interpersonal notification andmessaging tool and essentially that is what it is good for. But todaymost of us use our email as a kind of database, search engine,collaboration tool, knowledge management tool, project management tool,community tool, commerce tool, content distribution tool, etc. Emailwasn't designed for these functions and it really isn't very productive whenapplied to them.
For groups the email problem is even worse than it is for individuals –not only is everyone's individual email productivity declining anyway,but collectively as groupsize increases (and thus group information size increases as well),there is a multiplier effect that further reduces everyone'semail productivity in inverse proportion to the size of the group.Email becomes increasingly unproductive as group size and informationsize increase.
This is not just true of email, however, it's true of almost all theinformation tools we use today: Search engines, wikis, groupware,social networks, etc. They all suffer from this fundamental problem.Productivity breaks down with scale — and the problem is exponentially worse than it is for individuals in groups and organizations. But scale is increasing incessantly — that is a fact — and it will continue to do so for decades at least. Unless something is done about this we will simply be completely buried in our own information within about a decade.
The Semantic Web
I think the Semantic Web is a critical enabling technology that will help us get through this transition. It willenable the next big leap in productivity and collective intelligence.It may even be the technology that enables humans to flip the ratio so thatfor the first time in human history, larger groups of people canfunction more productively and intelligently than smaller groups. Itall comes down to enabling individuals and groups to maintain (andultimately improve) their productivity in theface of the continuing explosion in information and social complexitythat they areexperiencing.
The Semantic Web provides a richer underlying fabric for expressing,sharing, and connecting information. Essentially it provides a betterway to transform information into useful knowledge, and to share andcollaborate with it. It essentially upgrades the medium — in this case the Web and any other data that is connected to the Web — that we use for our information today.
By enriching the medium we can inturn enable new leaps in how applications, people, groups andorganizations can function. This has happened many times before in thehistory of technology. The printing press is one example. The Web is a more recent one. The Web enriched themedium (documents) with HTML and a new transport mechanism, HTTP, forsharing it. This brought about one of the largest leaps in humancollective cognition and productivity in history. But HTML really onlydescribes formatting and links. XML came next, to start to provide away to enrich the medium with information about structure –the parts of documents. The Semantic Web takes this one step further –it provides a way to enrich the medium with information about the meaning of the structure — what are those parts, what do various links actually mean?
Essentially the Semantic Web provides a means to abstract andexternalize human knowledge about information — previously the meaningof information lived only in our heads, and perhaps in certainspecially-written software applications that were coded to understandcertain types of data. The Semantic Web will disrupt this situation by providingopen-standards for encoding this meaning right into the medium itself.Any application that can speak the open-standards of the Semantic Webcan then begin to correctly interpret the meaning of information, andtreat it accordingly, without having to be specifically coded tounderstand each type of data it might encounter.
This is analogous to the benefit of HTML. Before HTML everyapplication had to be specifically coded to each different documentformat in order to display it. After HTML applications could all juststandardize on a single way to define the formats of differentdocuments. Suddenly a huge new landscape of information becameaccessible both to applications and to the people who used them.The Semantic Web does something similar: It provides a way to makethe data itself "smarter" so that applications don't have to know somuch to correctly interpret it. Any data structure — a document or adata record of any kind — that can be marked up with HTML to define its formatting, can also be marked up with RDFand OWL (the languages of the Semantic Web) to define its meaning.
Once semantic metadata is added, the document can not only bedisplayed properly by any application (thanks to HTML and XML), but itcan also be correctly understood by that application. For example theapplication can understand what kind of document it is, what it isabout, what the parts are, how the document relates to other things,and what particular data fields and values mean and how they map todata fields and values in other data records around the Web.
The Semantic Web enriches information with knowledge about what thatinformation means, what it is for, and how it relates to other things.With this in hand applications can go far beyond the limitations ofkeyword search, text processing, and brittle tabular data structures.Applications can start to do a much better job of finding, organizing,filtering, integrating, and making sense of ever larger and morecomplex distributed data sets around the Web.
Another great benefit ofthe Semantic Web is that this additional metadata can be added in atotally distributed fashion. The publisher of a document can add theirown metadata and other parties can then annotate that with their ownmetadata. Even HTML doesn't enable that level of cooperative markup (exceptperhaps in wikis). It takes a distributed solution to keep up with ahighly distributed problem (the Web). The Semantic Web is just such adistributed solution.
The Semantic Web will enrich information and this in turn will enable people, groups and applications to work with information more productively. In particular groups and organizations will benefit the most because that is where the problems of information overload and complexity are the worst. Individuals at least know how they organize their own information so they can do a reasonably good job of managing their own data. But groups are another story — because people don't necessarily know how others in their group organize their information. Finding what you need in other people's information is much harder than finding it in your own.
Where the Semantic Web can help with this is by providing a richer fabric for knowledge management. Information can be connected to an underlying ontology that defines not only the types of information available, but also the meaning and relationships between different tags or subject categories, and even the concepts that occur in the information itself. This makes organizing and finding group knowledge easier. In fact, eventually the hope is that people and groups will not have to organize their information manually anymore — it will happen in an almost fully-automatic fashion. The Semantic Web provides the necessary frameworks for making this possible.
But even with the Semantic Web in place and widely adopted, moreinnovation on top of it will be necessary before we can truly breakpast the Collective IQ Barrier such that organizations can in practiceachieve exponential increases in Collective IQ. Human beings are only able to cope with a few chunks ofinformation at a given moment, and our memories and ability to processcomplex data sets are limited. When group size and data size growbeyond certain limits, we simply cannot cope, we become overloaded andjammed, even with rich Semantic Web content at our disposal.
Social Filtering and Social Networking — Collective Cognition
Ultimately, to remain productive in the face of such complexity wewill need help. Often humans in roles that require them to cope with large scales of information, relationships andcomplexity hire assistants, but not all of us can affordto do that, and in some cases even assistants are not able to keep upwith the complexity that has to be managed.
Social networking andsocial filtering are two ways to expand the number of "assistants" weeach have access to, while also reducing the price of harnessing the collective intelligence of those assistants to just about nothing. Essentially these methodologies enable people toleverage the combined intelligence and attention of large communitiesof like-minded people who contribute their knowledge and expertise for free. It's a collective tit-for-tat form of altruism.
For example, Diggis a community that discovers the most interesting news articles. Itdoes this by enabling thousands of people to submit articles and voteon them. What Digg adds are a few clever algorithms on top of this for rankingarticles such that the most active ones bubble up to the top. It's notunlike a stock market trader's terminal, but for a completely differentclass of data. This is a great example of social filtering.
Anothergood example are prediction markets, where groups of people vote onwhat stock or movie or politician is likely to win — in some cases bybuying virtual stock in them — as a means to predict the future. Ithas been shown that prediction markets do a pretty good job of makingaccurate predictions in fact. In addition expertise referral serviceshelp people get answers to questions from communities of experts. Theseservices have been around in one form or another for decades and haverecently come back into vogue with services like Yahoo Answers. Amazonhas also taken a stab at this with their Amazon Mechanical Turk, whichenables "programs" to be constructed in which people perform the work.
I think social networking, social filtering, prediction markets,expertise referral networks, and collective collaboration are extremelyvaluable. By leveraging other people individuals and groups can stayahead of complexity and can also get the benefit of wide-areacollective cognition. These approaches to collective cognition arebeginning to filter into the processes of organizations and othercommunities. For example, there is recent interest in applying socialnetworking to niche communities and even enterprises.
The Semantic Webwill enrich all of these activities — making social networks andsocial filtering more productive. It's not an either/or choice — thesetechnologies are extremely compatible in fact. By leveraging acommunity to tag, classify and organize content, for example, themeaning of that content can be collectively enriched. This is alreadyhappening in a primitive way in many social media services. TheSemantic Web will simply provide a richer framework for doing this.
The combination of the Semantic Web with emerging social networkingand social filtering will enable something greater than either on it'sown. Together, together these two technologies will enable much smarter groups, social networks, communities and organizations. But this still will not get us all the way past the Collective IQBarrier. It may get us close the threshold though. To cross thethreshold we will need to enable an even more powerful form ofcollective cognition.
The Agent Web
To cope with the enormous future scale andcomplexity of the Web, desktop and enterprise, each individual and group willreally need not just a single assistant, or even a community of humanassistants working on common information (a social filtering communityfor example), they will need thousands or millions of assistants working specificallyfor them. This really only becomes affordable and feasible if we canvirtualize what an "assistant" is.
Human assistants are at the top ofthe intelligence pyramid — they are extremely smart and powerful, and they are expensive — they should not beused for simple tasks like sorting content, that's just a waste oftheir capabilities. It would be like using a supercomputer array tospellcheck a document. Instead, we need to free humans up to do thereally high-value information tasks, and find a way to farm out thelow-value, rote tasks to software. Software is cheap or even free and it can be replicated as much asneeded in order to parallelize. A virtual army of intelligent agents is less expensive than a single human assistant, and much more suited to sifting through millions of Web pages every day.
But where will these future intelligent agents get their intelligence? In past attempts at artificial intelligence, researchers tried to buildgigantic expert systems that could reason as well as a small child forexample. These attempts met with varying degrees of success, but theyall had one thing in common: They were monolithic applications.
I believe that that future intelligent agents should be simple. They should not be advanced AI programs or expert systems. They should be capable of a few simple behaviors, the most important of which is to reason against sets of rules and semantic data. The basic logic necessary for reasoning is not enormous and does not require any AI — it's just the ability to follow logical rules and perhaps do set operations. They should be lightweight and highly mobile. Insteadof vast monolithic AI, I am talking about vast numbers of very simpleagents that working together can do emergent, intelligent operations en masse.
For example search — you might deploy a thousand agents to search all the sites about Italy for recipes and then assemble those results into a database instantaneously. Or you might dispatch a thousand or more agents to watch for a job that matches your skills and goals across hundreds of thousands or millions of Websites. They could watch and wait until jobs that matched your criteria appeared, and then they could negotiate amongst themselves to determine which of the possible jobs they found were good enough to show you. Another scenario might be commerce — you could dispatch agents to find you the best deal on a vacation package, and they could even negotiate an optimal itinerary and price for you. All you would have to do is choose between a few finalist vacation packages and make the payment. This could be a big timesaver.
The above examples illustrate how agents might help an individual, but how might they help a group or organization? Well for one thing agents could continuously organize and re-organize information for a group. They could also broker social interactions — for example, by connecting people to other people with matching needs or interests, or by helping people find experts who could answer their questions. One of the biggest obstacles to getting past the Collective IQ Barrier is simply that people cannot keep track of more than a few social relationships and information sources at aany given time — but with an army of agents helping them, individuals might be able to cope with more relationships and data sources at once; the agents would act as their filters, deciding what to let through and how much priority to give it. Agents can also help to make recommendations, and to learn to facilitate and even automate various processes such as finding a time to meet, or polling to make a decision, or escalating an issue up or down the chain of command until it is resolved.
To make intelligent agents useful, they will need access to domain expertise. But the agents themselves will not contain any knowledge or intelligence of their own. The knowledge will exist outside on the Semantic Web, and so will the intelligence. Their intelligence, like their knowledge, will be externalized and virtualized in the form of axioms or rules that will exist out on the Web just like web pages.
For example, a set of axioms about travel could be published to the Web in the form of a document that formally defined them. Any agent that needed to process travel-related content could reference these axioms in order to reason intelligently about travel in the same way that it might reference an ontology about travel in order to interpret travel data structures. The application would not have to be specifically coded to know about travel — it could be a generic simple agent — but whenever it encountered travel-related content it could call up the axioms about travel from the location on the Web where they were hosted, and suddenly it could reason like an expert travel agent. What's great about this is that simple generic agents would be able to call up domain expertise on an as-needed basis for just about any domain they might encounter. Intelligence — the heuristics, algorithms and axioms that comprise expertise, would be as accessible as knowledge — the data and connections between ideas and information on the Web.
The axioms themselves would be created by human experts in various domains, and in some cases they might even be created or modified by agents as they learned from experience. These axioms might be provided for free as a public service, or as fee-based web-services via API's that only paying agents could access.
The key is that model is extremely scaleable — millions or billions of axioms could be created, maintained, hosted, accessed, and evolved in a totally decentralized and parallel manner by thousands or even hundreds of thousands of experts all around the Web. Instead of a few monolithic expert systems, the Web as a whole would become a giant distributed system of experts. There might be varying degrees of quality among competing axiom-sets available for any particular domain, and perhaps a ratings system could help to filter them over time. Perhaps a sort of natural selection of axioms might take place as humans and applications rated the end-results of reasoning using particular sets of axioms, and then fed these ratings back to the sources of this expertise, causing them to get more or less attention from other agents in the future. This process would be quite similar to the human-level forces of intellectual natural-selection at work in fields of study where peer-review and competition help to filter and rank ideas and their proponents.
Virtualizing Intelligence
What I have been describing is the virtualization of intelligence — making intelligence and expertise something that can be "published" to the Web and shared just like knowledge, just like an ontology, a document, a database, or a Web page. This is one of the long-term goals of the Semantic Web and it's already starting now via new languages, such as SWRL, that are being proposed for defining and publishing axioms or rules to the Web. For example, "a non-biologicalparent of a person is their step-parent" is asimple axiom. Another axiom might be, "A child of a sibling of your parent is your cousin." Using such axioms, an agent could make inferences and do simple reasoning about social relationships for example.
SWRL and other proposed rules languages provide potentialopen-standards for defining rules and publishing them to the Web sothat other applications can use them. By combining these rules withrich semantic data, applications can start to do intelligent things,without actually containing any of the intelligence themselves. The intelligence– the rules and data — can live "out there" on the Web, outside the code of various applications.
All theapplications have to know how to do is find relevant rules, interpret them, and apply them. Even the reasoning that may be necessary can be virtualized into remotely accessible Web services so applications don't even have to do that part themselves (although many may simply include open-source reasoners in the same way that they include open-source databases or search engines today).
In other words, just as HTML enables any app to process and formatany document on the Web, SWRL + RDF/OWL may someday enable any application to reasonabout what the document discusses. Reasoning is the last frontier. Byvirtualizing reasoning — the axioms that experts use to reason aboutdomains — we can really begin to store the building blocks of humanintelligence and expertise on the Web in a universally-accessibleformat. This to me is when the actual "Intelligent Web" (what I callWeb 4.0) will emerge.
The value of this for groups and organizations is that they can start to distill their intelligence from individuals that comprise them into a more permanent and openly accessible form — axioms that live on the Web and can be accessed by everyone. For example, a technical support team for a product learns many facts and procedures related to their product over time. Currently this learning is stored as knowledge in some kind of tech support knowledgebase. But the expertise for how to find and apply this knowledge still resides mainly in the brains of the people who comprise the team itself.
The Semantic Web provides ways to enrich the knowledgebase as well as to start representing and saving the expertise that the people themselves hold in their heads, in the form of sets of axioms and procedures. By storing not just the knowledge but also the expertise about the product, the humans on the team don't have to work as hard to solve problems — agents can actually start to reason about problems and suggest solutions based on past learning embodied in the common set of axioms. Of course this is easier said than done — but the technology at least exists in nascent form today. In a decade or more it will start to be practical to apply it.
Group Minds
Someday in the not-too-distant-future groups will be able toleverage hundreds or thousands of simple intelligent agents. Theseagents will work for them 24/7 to scour the Web, the desktop, theenterprise, and other services and social networks they are related to. They will help both the individuals as well as the collectives as-a-whole. They willbe our virtual digital assistants, always alert and looking for thingsthat matter to us, finding patterns, learning on our behalf, reasoningintelligently, organizing our information, and then filtering it,visualizing it, summarizing it, and making recommendations to us sothat we can see the Big Picture, drill in wherever we wish, and makedecisions more productively.
Essentially these agents will give groups something like their own brains. Today the only brains in a group reside in the skulls of the people themselves. But in the future perhaps we will see these technologies enable groups to evolve their own meta-level intelligences: systems of agents reasoning on group expertise and knowledge.
This will be a fundamental leap to a new order of collective intelligence. For the first time groups will literally have minds of their own, minds that transcend the mere sum of the individual human minds that comprise their human, living facets. I call these systems "Group Minds" and I think they are definitely coming. In fact there has been quite a bit of research on the subject of facilitating group collaboration with agents, for example, in government agencies such as DARPA and the military, where finding ways to help groups think more intelligently is often a matter of life and death.
The big win from a future in which individuals and groups canleverage large communities of intelligent agents is that they will bebetter able to keep up with the explosive growth of information complexity andsocial complexity. As the saying goes, "it takes a village." There is just too much information, and too many relationships, changing too fast and this is only going to get more intense in years to come. The only way to cope with such a distributed problem is a distributed solution.
Perhaps by 2030 it will not be uncommon for Individuals and groups to maintain largenumbers of virtual assistants — agents that will help them keep abreast of themassively distributed, always growing and shifting information and sociallandscapes. When you really think about this, how else could we eversolve this? This is really the only practical long-term solution. But today it is still a bit of a pipedream; we're not there yet. The key however is that we are closer than we've ever been before.
The Semantic Web provides the key enabling technology for all ofthis to happen someday in the future. By enriching the content of theWeb it first paves the way to a generation of smarter applications andmore productive individuals, groups and organizations.
The next majorleap will be when we begin to virtualize reasoning in the form ofaxioms that become part of the Semantic Web. This will enable a newgeneration of applications that can reason across information andservices. This will ultimately lead to intelligent agents that will be able to assist individuals,groups, social networks, communities, organizations and marketplaces sothat they can remain productive in the fact of the astonishinginformation and social network complexity in our future.
By adding more knowledge into our information, the Semantic Webmakes it possible for applications (and people) to use information moreproductively. By adding more intelligence between people, information,and applications, the Semantic Web will also enable people andapplications to become smarter. In the future, these more-intelligentapps will facilitate higher levels of individual and collectivecognition by functioning as virtual intelligent assistants forindividuals and groups (as well as for online services).
Once we begin to virtualize not just knowledge (semantics) but alsointelligence (axioms) we will start to build Group Minds — groups that have primitive minds of their own. When we reach this point we will finally enable organizations to breakpast the Collective IQ Barrier: Organizations will start to becomesmarter than the sum of their parts. The intelligence of anorganization will not just be from its people, it will also come fromits applications. The number of intelligent applications in anorganization may outnumber the people by 1000 to 1, effectivelyamplifying each individual's intelligence as well as the collectiveintelligence of the group.
Because software agents work all the time,can self-replicate when necessary, and are extremely fast and precise,they are ideally-suited to sifting in parallel through the millions or billions ofdata records on the Web, day in and day out. Humans and even groups ofhumans will never be able to do this as well. And that's not what theyshould be doing! They are far too intelligent for that kind of work.Humans should be at the top of the pyramid, making the decisions,innovating, learning, and navigating.
When we finally reach this stage where networks of humans and smartapplications are able to work together intelligently for common goals,I believe we will witness a real change in the way organizations arestructured. In Group Minds, hierarchy will not be as necessary — the maximum effectivesize of a human Group Mind will be perhaps in the thousands or even themillions instead of around 50 people. As a result the shape of organizations in thefuture will be extremely fluid, and most organizations will be flat orcontinually shifting networks. For more on this kind of organization,read about virtual teams and networking, such as these books (by friends of mine who taught me everything I know about network-organization paradigms.)
I would also like to note that I am not proposing "strong AI" — a vision in which we someday makeartificial intelligences that are as or more intelligent thanindividual humans. I don't think intelligent agents will individually be very intelligent. It will only be in vast communities of agents that intelligence will start to emerge. Agents are analogous to the neurons in the human brain — they really aren't very powerful on their own.
I'm also not proposing that Group Minds will beas or more intelligent as the individual humans in groups anytime soon. I don't think thatis likely in our lifetimes. The cognitive capabilities of an adult human are the product of millions of years of evolution. Even in the accelerated medium of the Web where evolution can take place much faster in silico, it may still take decades or even centuries to evolve AI that rivals the human mind (and I doubt such AI will ever be truly conscious, which means that humans, with their inborn natural consciousness, may always play a special and exclusive role in the world to come, but that is the subject of a different essay). But even if they will not be as intelligent as individual humans, Ido think that Group Minds, facilitated by masses of slightly intelligent agents and humans working in concert, can goa long way in helping individuals and groups become more productive.
It's important to note that the future I am describing is notscience-fiction, but it also will not happen overnight. It will take atleast several decades, if not longer. But with the seeminglyexponential rate of change of innovation, we may make very large stepsin this direction very soon. It is going to be an exciting lifetime forall of us.
Diagram: Beyond Keyword (and Natural Language) Search
Here at Radar Networks we are working on practical ways to bring the Semantic Web to end-users. One of the interesting themes that has come up a lot, both internally, as well as in discussions with VC's, is the coming plateau in the productivity of keyword search. As the Web gets increasingly large and complex, keyword search becomes less effective as a means for making sense of it. In fact, it will even decline in productivity in the future. Natural language search will be a bit better than keyword search, but ultimately won't solve the problem either — because like keyword search it cannot really see or make use of the structure of information.
I've put together a new diagram showing how the Semantic Web will enable the next step-function in productivity on the Web. It's still a work in progress and may change frequently for a bit, so if you want to blog it, please link to this post, or at least the .JPG image behind the thumbnail below so that people get the latest image. As always your comments are appreciated. (Click the thumbnail below for a larger version).
Today a typical Google search returns up to hundreds of thousands or even millions of results — but we only really look at the first page or two of results. What about the other results we don't look at? There is a lot of room to improve the productivity of search, and the help people deal with increasingly large collections of information.
Keyword search doesn't understand the meaning of information, let alone its structure. Natural language search is a little better at understanding the meaning of information — but it still won't help with the structure of information. To really improve productivity significantly as the Web scales, we will need forms of search that are data-structure-aware — that are able to search within and across data structures, not just unstructured text or semistructured HTML. This is one of the key benefits of the coming Semantic Web: it will enable the Web to be navigated and searched just like a database.
Starting with the "data web" enabled by RDF, OWL, ontologies and SPARQL, structured data is becoming increasingly accessible, searchable and mashable. This in turn sets the stage for a better form of search: semantic search. Semantic search combines the best of keyword, natural language, database and associative search capabilities together.
Without the Semantic Web, productivity will plateau and then gradually decline as the Web, desktop and enterprise continue to grow in size and complexity. I believe that with the appropriate combination of technology and user-experience we can flip this around so that productivity actually increases as the size and complexity of the Web increase.
See Also: A Visual Timeline of the Past, Present and Future of the Web
Envisioning the Whole Digital Person
Another article of note on the subject of our evolving digital lives and what user-experience designers should be thinking about:
Our lives are becoming increasingly digitized—from the ways we
communicate, to our entertainment media, to our e-commerce
transactions, to our online research. As storage becomes cheaper and
data pipes become faster, we are doing more and more online—and in the
process, saving a record of our digital lives, whether we like it or
In the coming years, our ability to interact with the information
we're so rapidly generating will determine how successfully we can
manage our digital lives. There is a great challenge at our doorsteps—a
shift in the way we live with each other.
As designers of user experiences for digital products
and services, we can make people's digital lives more meaningful and
less confusing. It is our responsibility to envision not only
techniques for sorting, ordering, and navigating these digital
information spaces, but also to devise methods of helping people feel
comfortable with such interactions. To better understand and ultimately
solve this information management problem, we should take a holistic
view of the digital person. While our data might be scattered, people
need to feel whole.
Web 3.0 Roundup: Radar Networks, Powerset, Metaweb and Others…
It's been a while since I posted about what my stealth venture, Radar Networks, is working on. Lately I've been seeing growing buzz in the industry around the "semantics" meme — for example at the recent DEMO conference, several companies used the word "semantics" in their pitches. And of course there have been some fundings in this area in the last year, including Radar Networks and other companies.
Clearly the "semantic" sector is starting to heat up. As a result, I've been getting a lot of questions from reporters and VC's about how what we are doing compares to other companies such as for example, Powerset, Textdigger, and Metaweb. There was even a rumor that we had already closed our series B round! (That rumor is not true; in fact the round hasn't started yet, although I am getting very strong VC interest and we will start the round pretty soon).
In light of all this I thought it might be helpful to clarify what we are doing, how we understand what other leading players in this space are doing, and how we look at this sector.
Indexing the Decades of the Web
First of all, before we get started, there is one thing to clear up. The Semantic Web is part of what is being called "Web 3.0" by some, but it is in my opinion really just one of several converging technologies and trends that will define this coming era of the Web. I've written here about a proposed definition of Web 3.0, in more detail.
For those of you who don't like terms like Web 2.0, and Web 3.0, I also want to mention that I agree — we all want to avoid a rapid series of such labels or an arms-race of companies claiming to be > x.0. So I have a practical proposal: Let's use these terms to index decades since the Web began. This is objective — we can all agree on when decades begin and end, and if we look at history each decade is characterized by various trends.
I think this is reasonable proposal and actually useful (and also avoids endless new x.0's being announced every year). Web 1.0 was therefore the first decade of the Web: 1990 – 2000. Web 2.0 is the second decade, 2000 – 2010. Web 3.0 is the coming third decade, 2010 – 2020 and so on. Each of these decades is (or will be) characterized by particular technology movements, themes and trends, and these indices, 1.0, 2.0, etc. are just a convenient way of referencing them. This is a useful way to discuss history, and it's not without precedent. For example, various dynasties and historical periods are also given names and this provides shorthand way of referring to those periods and their unique flavors. To see my timeline of these decades, click here.
So with that said, what is Radar Networks actually working on? First of all, Radar Networks is still in stealth, although we are
planning to go beta in 2007. Until we get closer to launch what I can
say without an NDA is still limited. But at least I can give some
helpful hints for those who are interested. This article provides some hints, as well as what I hope is a helpful tutorial about natural language search and the Semantic Web, and how they differ. I'll also discuss how Radar Networks compares some of the key startup ventures working with semantics in various ways today (there are many other companies in this sector — if you know of any interesting ones, please let me know in the comments; I'm starting to compile a list).
(click the link below to keep reading the rest of this article…)
How the WebOS Evolves?
Here is my timeline of the past, present and future of the Web. Feel free to put this meme on your own site, but please link back to the master image at this site (the URL that the thumbnail below points to) because I'll be updating the image from time to time.
This slide illustrates my current thinking here at Radar Networks about where the Web (and we) are heading. It shows a timeline of technology leading from the prehistoric desktop era to the possible future of the WebOS…
Note that as well as mapping a possible future of the Web, here I am also proposing that the Web x.0 terminology be used to index the decades of the Web since 1990. Thus we are now in the tail end of Web 2.0 and are starting to lay the groundwork for Web 3.0, which fully arrives in 2010.
This makes sense to me. Web 2.0 was really about upgrading the "front-end" and user-experience of the Web. Much of the innovation taking place today is about starting to upgrade the "backend" of the Web and I think that will be the focus of Web 3.0 (the front-end will probably not be that different from Web 2.0, but the underlying technologies will advance significantly enabling new capabilities and features).
See also: This article I wrote redefining what the term "Web 3.0" means.
See also: A Visual Graph of the Future of Productivity
Please note: This is a work in progress and is not perfect yet. I've been tweaking thepositions to get the technologies and dates right. Part of thechallenge is fitting the text into the available spaces. If anyone outthere has suggestions regarding where I've placed things on thetimeline, or if I've left anything out that should be there, please letme know in the comments on this post and I'll try to read just and update the image from time to time. If you would like to produce abetter version of this image, please do so and send it to me forinclusion here, with the same Creative Commons license, ideally.
Congratulations to Adam Cheyer and Change.org
My friend and colleague, Adam Cheyer, from SRI, recently helped to advise and launch Change.org — a social network for nonprofit activism. It's a great site for a great cause. It's also a great example of a special-purpose social network — a useful social network. Congratulations to Adam and the team over there! Read the TechCrunch review here.
The Semantic Web is About Helping People Use the Web More Productively
I've been reading some of the further posts on various blogs in reaction to the Markoff article in the New York Times last Sunday. There is a tremendous amount of misconception about the Semantic Web– as evidenced for example by Ross Mayfield's post recently. Ross implied that the Semantic Web is about automating the Web, rather than facilitating people. This is a misconception that others have taken to even further extremes — some people have characterized it as an effort to replace humans, replace social networks and social software, etc. etc. That is simply NOT at all correct! Quite the opposite in fact.
The Semantic Web is just a way to augment and improve the EXISTING Web and all the existing relationships, groups, communities, social networks, user-experiences, apps, content, and online services on it. It doesn't replace the Web we have, it just makes it smarter. It doesn't replace human intelligence and decision-making, it just augments human thinking, so that individuals and groups can overcome the growing complexity of information overload on the Web.
Minding The Planet — The Meaning and Future of the Semantic Web
- Master Copy can be found at this URL or http://tinyurl.com/yynb93
- Last Update: Tuesday, November 7, 2006, 10:17AM PST
- License — This article is distributed under the Creative Commons Deed. If you would like to distribute a version of thisarticle, please link back to http://www.mindingtheplanet.net from yourversion, thanks.
- Printable version — Click here to download the printable PDF version of this article
- Illustrated Version — See the version by the Lifeboat Foundation
Many years ago, in the late 1980s, while I was still a college student, I visited my late grandfather, Peter F. Drucker, at his home in Claremont, California. He lived near the campus of Claremont College where he was a professor emeritus. On that particular day, I handed him a manuscript of a book I was trying to write, entitled, "Minding the Planet" about how the Internet would enable the evolution of higher forms of collective intelligence.
My grandfather read my manuscript and later that afternoon we sat together on the outside back porch and he said to me, "One thing is certain: Someday, you will write this book." We both knew that the manuscript I had handed him was not that book, a fact that was later verified when I tried to get it published. I gave up for a while and focused on college, where I was studying philosophy with a focus on artificial intelligence. And soon I started working in the fields of artificial intelligence and supercomputing at companies like Kurzweil, Thinking Machines, and Individual.
A few years later, I co-founded one of the early Web companies, EarthWeb, where among other things we built many of the first large commercial Websites and later helped to pioneer Java by creating several large knowledge-sharing communities for software developers. Along the way I continued to think about collective intelligence. EarthWeb and the first wave of the Web came and went. But this interest and vision continued to grow. In 2000 I started researching the necessary technologies to begin building a more intelligent Web. And eventually that led me to start my present company, Radar Networks, where we are now focused on enabling the next-generation of collective intelligence on the Web, using the new technologies of the Semantic Web.
But ever since that day on the porch with my grandfather, I remembered what he said: "Someday, you will write this book." I've tried many times since then to write it. But it never came out the way I had hoped. So I tried again. Eventually I let go of the book form and created this weblog instead. And as many of my readers know, I've continued to write here about my observations and evolving understanding of this idea over the years. This article is my latest installment, and I think it's the first one that meets my own standards for what I really wanted to communicate. And so I dedicate this article to my grandfather, who inspired me to keep writing this, and who gave me his prediction that I would one day complete it.
This is an article about a new generation of technology that is sometimes called the Semantic Web, and which could also be called the Intelligent Web, or the global mind. But what is the Semantic Web, and why does it matter, and how does it enable collective intelligence? And where is this all headed? And what is the long-term far future going to be like? Is the global mind just science-fiction? Will a world that has a global mind be good place to live in, or will it be some kind of technological nightmare?
I've often joked that it is ironic that a term that contains theword "semantic" has such an ambiguous meaning for most people. Mostpeople just have no idea what this means, they have no context for it,it is not connected to their experience and knowledge. This is aproblem that people who are deeply immersed in the trenches of theSemantic Web have not been able to solve adequately — they have notfound the words to communicate what they can clearly see, what they areworking on, and why it matters for everyone. In this article I havetried, and hopefully succeeded, in providing a detailed introductionand context for the Semantic Web fornon-technical people. But even technical people working in the fieldmay find something of interest here as I piece together the fragmentsinto a Big Picture and a vision for what might be called "Semantic Web2.0."
I hope the reader will bear with me as Ibounce around across different scales of technology and time, and fromthe extremes of core technology to wild speculation in order to tellthis story. If you are looking for the cold hardscience of it all, this article will provide an understanding but willnot satisfy your need for seeing the actual code; there are otherplaceswhere you can find that level of detail and rigor. But if you want tounderstand what it all really means and what the opportunity and futurelookslike – this may be what you are looking for.
I should also note that all of this is my personal view of what I'vebeen working on,and what it really means to me. It is not necessarily the official viewof the mainstream academic Semantic Web community — although there arecertainly many places where we all agree. But I'm sure that somereaders will certainly disagree or raise objections to some of myassertions, and certainly to my many far-flung speculations about thefuture. I welcome those different perspectives; we're all trying tomake sense of this and the more of us who do that together, the more wecan collectively start to really understand it. So please feel free towrite your own vision or response, and please let me know so I can linkto it!
So with this Prelude in mind, let's get started…
The Semantic Web Vision
The Semantic Web is a set of technologies which are designed toenable aparticular vision for the future of the Web – a future in which allknowledge exists on the Web in a format that software applications canunderstand andreason about. By making knowledge more accessible to software, softwarewillessentially become able to understand knowledge, think about knowledge,and createnew knowledge. In other words, software will be able to be moreintelligent –not as intelligent as humans perhaps, but more intelligent than say,your wordprocessor is today.
The dream of making software more intelligent has been around almost as longas software itself. And although it is taking longer to materialize than past experts hadpredicted, progress towards this goal is being steadilymade. At the same time, the shape of this dream is changing. It is becomingmore realistic and pragmatic. The original dream of artificial intelligence wasthat we would all have personal robot assistants doing all the work we don'twant to do for us. That is not the dream of the Semantic Web. Instead, today'sSemantic Web is about facilitating what humans do – it is about helping humansdo things more intelligently. It's not a vision in which humans do nothing andsoftware does everything.
The Semantic Web vision is not just about helping software become smarter –it is about providing new technologies that enable people, groups,organizations and communities to be smarter.
For example, by providing individuals with tools that learn about what theyknow, and what they want, search can be much more accurate and productive.
Using software that is able to understand and automatically organize largecollections of knowledge, groups, organizations and communities can reachhigher levels of collective intelligence and they can cope with volumes ofinformation that are just too great for individuals or even groups tocomprehend on their own.
Another example: more efficient marketplaces can be enabled by software thatlearns about products, services, vendors, transactions and market trends andunderstands how to connect them together in optimal ways.
In short, the Semantic Web aims to make software smarter, not just for itsown sake, but in order to help make people, and groups of people, smarter. Inthe original Semantic Web vision this fact was under-emphasized, leading to theimpression that Semantic Web was only about automating the world. In fact, it isreally about facilitating the world.
The Semantic Web Opportunity
The Semantic Web is one of the most significant things to happen since theWeb itself. But it will not appear overnight. It will take decades. It willgrow in a bottom-up, grassroots, emergent, community-driven manner just likethe Web itself. Many things have to converge for this trend to really take off.
The core open standards already exist, but the necessary development tools haveto mature, the ontologies that define human knowledge have to come into beingand mature, and most importantly we need a few real "killer apps" to prove thevalue and drive adoption of the Semantic Web paradigm. The first generation ofthe Web had its Mozilla, Netscape, Internet Explorer, and Apache – and it alsohad HTML, HTTP, a bunch of good development tools, and a few killer apps andservices such as Yahoo! and thousands of popular Web sites. The same things arenecessary for the Semantic Web to take off.
And this is where we are today – this all just about to start emerging.There are several companies racing to get this technology, or applications ofit, to market in various forms. Within a year or two you will see mass-consumerSemantic Web products and services hit the market, and within 5 years therewill be at least a few "killer apps" of the Semantic Web. Ten years from nowthe Semantic Web will have spread into many of the most popular sites andapplications on the Web. Within 20 years all content and applications on theInternet will be integrated with the Semantic Web. This is a sea-change. A bigevolutionary step for the Web.
The Semantic Web is an opportunity to redefine, or perhaps to better define,all the content and applications on the Web. That's a big opportunity. Andwithin it there are many business opportunities and a lot of money to be made. It'snot unlike the opportunity of the first generation of the Web. There areplatform opportunities, content opportunities, commerce opportunities, searchopportunities, community and social networking opportunities, and collaborationopportunities in this space. There is room for a lot of players to compete andat this point the field is wide open.
The Semantic Web is a blue ocean waiting to be explored. And like anyunexplored ocean its also has its share of reefs, pirate islands, hidden treasure, shoals,whirlpools, sea monsters and typhoons. But there are new worlds out there to be discovered,and they exert an irresistible pull on the imagination. This is an excitingfrontier – and also one fraught with hard technical and social challenges thathave yet to be solved. For early ventures in the Semantic Web arena, it's notgoing to be easy, but the intellectual and technological challenges, and the potentialfinancial rewards, glory, and benefit to society, are worth the effort andrisk. And this is what all great technological revolutions are made of.
Semantic Web 2.0
Some people who have heard the term "Semantic Web" thrown around too muchmay think it is a buzzword, and they are right. But it is not just a buzzword –it actually has some substance behind it. That substance hasn't emerged yet,but it will. Early critiques of the Semantic Web were right – the early visiondid not leverage concepts such as folksonomy and user-contributed content atall. But that is largely because when the Semantic Web was originally conceivedof Web 2.0 hadn't happened yet. The early experiments that came out of researchlabs were geeky, to put it lightly, and impractical, but they are already beingfollowed up by more pragmatic, user-friendly approaches.
Today's Semantic Web – what we might call "Semantic Web 2.0" is a kinder,gentler, more social Semantic Web. It combines the best of the original visionwith what we have all learned about social software and community in the last10 years. Although much of this is still in the lab, it is already starting totrickle out. For example, recently Yahoo! started a pilot of the Semantic Webbehind their food vertical. Other organizations are experimenting with usingSemantic Web technology in parts of their applications, or to store or mapdata. But that's just the beginning.
The Google Factor
Entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and technologists are increasinglystarting to see these opportunities. Who will be the "Google of the SemanticWeb?" – will it be Google itself? That's doubtful. Like any entrenchedincumbent, Google is heavily tied to a particular technology and worldview. Andin Google's case it is anything but semantic today. It would be easier for anupstart to take this position than for Google to port their entireinfrastructure and worldview to a Semantic Web way of thinking.
If it is goingto be Google it will most likely be by acquisition rather than by internal origination. Andthis makes more sense anyway – for Google is in a position where they can just wait and buy the winner,at almost any price, rather than competing in the playing field. One thing to note however is that Google has at least one product offering that shows some potential for becoming a key part of the Semantic Web. I am speaking of Google Base, Google's open database which is meant to be a registry for structured data so that it can be found in Google search. But Google Base does not conform to or make use of the many open standards of the Semantic Web community. That may or may not be a good thing, depending on your perspective.
Of course the downside of Google waiting to join the mainstream Semantic Web community until after the winner is announced is very large – once there is a winner it may be too late for Google to beat them. Thewinner of the Semantic Web race could very well unseat Google. The strategistsat Google are probably not yet aware of this but as soon as they seesignificant traction around a major Semantic Web play it will become of interestto them.
In any case, I think there won't be just one winner, there will be severalmajor Semantic Web companies in the future, focusing on different parts of theopportunity. And you can be sure that if Google gets into the game, every majorportal will need to get into this space at some point or risk becomingirrelevant. There will be demand and many acquisitions. In many ways the Semantic Web will not be controlled by just one company — it will be more like a fabric that connects them all together.
Context is King — The Nature ofKnowledge
It should be clear by now that the Semantic Web is all about enablingsoftware (and people) to work with knowledge more intelligently. But what isknowledge? Knowledge is not just information. It is meaningful information – itis information plus context. For example, if I simply say the word "sem" toyou, it is just raw information, it is not knowledge. It probably has nomeaning to you other than a particular set of letters that you recognize and asound you can pronounce, and the mere fact that this information was stated byme.
But if I tell you that "sem" it is the Tibetan word for "mind" then suddenly,"sem means mind in Tibetan" to you. If I further tell you that Tibetans have about as many words for "mind" as Eskimos have for "snow," this is further meaning. Thisis context, in other words, knowledge, about the sound "sem." The sound is raw information. When it is given context itbecomes a word, a word that has meaning, a word that is connected to conceptsin your mind – it becomes knowledge. By connecting raw information to context,knowledge is formed.
Once you have acquired a piece of knowledge such as "sem means mind in Tibetan," you may then also form further knowledgeabout it. For example, you may form the memory, "Nova said that 'sem means mind in Tibetan.'" You mightalso connect the word "sem" to networks of further concepts you have about Tibet and your understanding of what the word "mind" means.
The mind is the organ of meaning – mind is where meaning is stored,interpreted and created. Meaning is not "out there" in the world, it is purelysubjective, it is purely mental. Meaning is almost equivalent to mind in fact.For the two never occur separately. Each of our individual minds has some way of internally representing meaning — when we read or hear a word that we know, our minds connect that to a network of concepts about it and at that moment it means something to us.
Digging deeper, if you are really curious,or you happen to know Greek, you may also find that a similar sound occurs inthe Greek word, sēmantikós – which means "having meaning" and in turn is the root of the English word "semantic"which means "pertaining to or arising from meaning." That's an odd coincidence!"Sem" occurs in Tibetan word for mind, and the English and Greek words that allrelate to the concepts of "meaning" and "mind." Even stranger is that not only do these words have a similar sound, they have a similar meaning.
With all this knowledge at yourdisposal, when you then see the term "Semantic Web" you may be able to inferthat it has something to do with adding "meaning" to the Web. However, if youwere a Tibetan, perhaps you might instead think the term had something to dowith adding "mind" to the Web. In either case you would be right!
Discovering New Connections
We've discovered a new connection — namely that there is an implicit connectionbetween "sem" in Greek, English and Tibetan: they all relate to meaning andmind. It's not a direct, explicit connection – it's not evident unless you digfor it. But it's a useful tidbit of knowledge once it's found. Unlike the direct migration of the sound "sem" from Greek to English,there may not have ever been a direct transfer of this sound from Greek toSanskrit to Tibetan. But in a strange and unexpected way, they are all connected. This connectionwasn't necessarily explicitly stated by anyone before, but was uncovered byexploring our network of concepts and making inferences.
The sequence of thought about "sem"above is quite similar to kind of intellectual reasoning and discovery that theactual Semantic Web seeks to enable software to do automatically. How is this kind of reasoning and discovery enabled? The Semantic Web providesa set of technologies for formally defining the context of information. Just asthe Web relies on a standard formal specification for "marking up" informationwith formatting codes that enable any applications that understand those codesto format the information in the same way, the Semantic Web relies on newstandards for "marking up" information with statements about its context – itsmeaning – that enable any applications to understand, and reason about, the meaning of those statements in the same way.
By applying semantic reasoning agents to large collections of semantically enhanced content, all sorts of new connections may be inferred, leading to new knowledge, unexpected discoveries and useful additional context around content. This kind of reasoning and discovery is already taking place in fields from drug discovery and medical research, to homeland security and intelligence. The Semantic Web is not the only way to do this — but it certainly will improve the process dramatically. And of course, with this improvement will come new questions about how to assess and explain how various inferences were made, and how to protect privacy as our inferencing capabilities begin to extend across ever more sources of public and private data. I don't have the answers to these questions, but others are working on them and I have confidence that solutions will be arrived at over time.
Smart Data
By marking up information with metadata that formally codifies its context, we can make the data itself "smarter." The data becomes self-describing. When you get a piece of data you also get the necessary metadata for understanding it. For example, if I sent you a document containing the word "sem" in it, I could add markup around that word indicating that it is the word for "mind" in the Tibetan language.
Similarly, a document containing mentions of "Radar Networks" could contain metadata indicating that "Radar Networks" is an Internet company, not a product or a type of radar technology. A document about a person could contain semantic markup indicating that they are residents of a certain city, experts on Italian cooking, and members of a certain profession. All of this could be encoded as metadata in a form that software could easily understand. The data carries more information about its own meaning.
The alternative to smart data would be for software to actually read and understand natural language as well as humans. But that's really hard. To correctly interpret raw natural language, software would have to be developed that knew as much as a human being. But think about how much teaching and learning is required to raise a human being to the point where they can read at an adult level. It is likely that similar training would be necessary to build software that could do that. So far that goal has not been achieved, although some attempts have been made. While decent progress in natural language understanding has been made, most software that can do this is limited around particular vertical domains, and it's brittle — it doesn't do a good job of making sense of terms and forms of speech that it wasn't trained to parse and make sense of.
Instead of trying to make software a million times smarter than it is today, it is much easier to just encode more metadata about what our information means. That turns out to be less work in the end. And there's an added benefit to this approach — the meaning exists with the data and travels with it. It is independent of any one software program — all software can access it. And because the meaning of information is stored with the information itself, rather than in the software, the software doesn't have to be enormous to be smart. It just has to know the basic language for interpreting the semantic metadata it finds on the information it works with.
Smart data enables relatively dumb software to be smarter with less work. That's an immediate benefit. And in the long-term as software actually gets smarter, smart data will make it easier for it to start learning and exploring on its own. So it's a win-win approach. Start with by adding semantic metadata to data, end up with smarter software.
Making Statements About the World
Metadata comes down to making statements about the world in a manner that machines, and perhaps even humans, can understand unambiguously. The same piece of metadata should be interpreted in the same way by different applications and readers.
There are many kinds of statementsthat can be made about information to provide it with context. For example, youcan state a definition such as "person" means "a human being or a legalentity." You can state an assertion such as "Sue is a human being." You canstate a rule such that "if x is a human being, then x is a person."
From thesestatements it can then be inferred that "Sue is a person." This inference is soobvious to you and me that it seems trivial, but most software today cannot dothis. It doesn't know what a person is, let alone what a name is. But ifsoftware could do this, then it could for example, automatically organizedocuments by the people they are related to, or discover connections betweenpeople who were mentioned in a set of documents, or it could find documentsabout people who were related to particular topics, or it could give you a listof all the people mentioned in a set of documents, or all the documents relatedto a person.
Of course this is a very basicexample. But imagine if your software didn't just know about people – it knewabout most of the common concepts that occur in your life. Your software wouldthen be able to help you work with your documents just about as intelligentlyas you are able to do by yourself, or perhaps even more intelligently, becauseyou are just one person and you have limited time and energy but your softwarecould work all the time, and in parallel, to help you.
Examples and Benefits
How could the existence of the Semantic Web and all the semantic metadata that defines it be really useful toeveryone in the near-term?
Well, for example, the problem of email spam would finally be cured:your software would be able to look at a message and know whether it wasmeaningful and/or relevant to you or not.
Similarly, you would never have to file anything by hand again. Your software could atuomate all filing and information organization tasks for you because it would understand your information and your interests. It would be able to figure out when to file something in a single folder, multiple folders, or new ones. It would organize everything — documents, photos, contacts, bookmarks, notes, products, music, video, data records — and it would do it even better and more consistently than you could on your own. Your software wouldn't just organize stuff, it would turn it into knowledge by connecting it to more context. It could this not just for individuals, but for groups, organizations and entire communities.
Another example: search would bevastly better: you could search conversationally by typing in everyday naturallanguage and you would get precisely what you asked for, or even what youneeded but didn't know how to ask for correctly, and nothing else. Your searchengine could even ask you questions to help you narrow what you want. You wouldfinally be able to converse with software in ordinary speech and it would understandyou.
The process of discovery would be easier too. You could have software agent that worked as your personal recommendation agent. It would constantly be looking in all the places you read or participate in for things that are relevant to your past, present and potential future interests and needs. It could then alert you in a contextually sensitive way, knowing how to reach you and how urgently to mark things. As you gave it feedback it could learn and do a better job over time.
Going even further with this,semantically-aware software – software that is aware of context, software thatunderstands knowledge – isn't just for helping you with your information, itcan also help to enrich and facilitate, and even partially automate, yourcommunication and commerce (when you want it to). So for example, your software could help you with your email. It would be able to recommend responses to messages for you, or automate the process. It would be able to enrich your messaging anddiscussions by automatically cross-linking what you are speaking about withrelated messages, discussions, documents, Web sites, subject categories,people, organizations, places, events, etc.
Shopping and marketplaces wouldalso become better – you could search precisely for any kind of product, withany specific attributes, and find it anywhere on the Web, in any store. You could post classified ads and automatically get relevant matches according to your priorities, from all over the Web, or only from specific places and parties that match your criteria for who you trust. You could also easily invent a new custom datastructure for posting classified ads for a new kind of product or service and publishit to the Web in a format that other Web services and applications couldimmediately mine and index without having to necessarily integrate with yoursoftware or data schema directly.
You could publish an entiredatabase to the Web and other applications and services could immediately startto integrate your data with their data, without having to migrate your schemaor their own. You could merge data from different data sources together to create new data sources without having to ever touch or look at an actual database schema.
Bumps on the Road
The above examples illustrate thepotential of the Semantic Web today, but the reality on the ground is that the technology isstill in the early phases of evolution. Even for experienced software engineersand Web developers, it is difficult to apply in practice. The main obstaclesare twofold:
(1) The Tools Problem:
There are very few commercial-gradetools for doing anything with the Semantic Web today – Most of the tools forbuilding semantically-aware applications, or for adding semantics toinformation are still in the research phase and were designed for expertcomputer scientists who specialize in knowledge representation, artificialintelligence, and machine learning.
These tools require a largelearning curve to work with and they don't generally support large-scaleapplications – they were designed mainly to test theories and frameworks, notto actually apply them. But if the Semantic Web is ever going to becomemainstream, it has to be made easier to apply – it has to be made moreproductive and accessible for ordinary software and content developers.
Fortunately, the tools problem isalready on the verge of being solved. Companies such as my own venture, RadarNetworks, are developing the next generation of tools for building Semantic Webapplications and Semantic Web sites. These tools will hide most of thecomplexity, enabling ordinary mortals to build applications and content thatleverage the power of semantics without needing PhD's in knowledge representation.
(2) The Ontology Problem:
The Semantic Web providesframeworks for defining systems of formally defined concepts called "ontologies,"that can then be used to connect information to context in an unambiguous way. Withoutontologies, there really can be no semantics. The ontologies ARE the semantics,they define the meanings that are so essential for connecting information tocontext.
But there are still few widely used or standardized ontologies. Andgetting people to agree on common ontologies is not generally easy. Everyonehas their own way of describing things, their own worldview, and let's face itnobody wants to use somebody else's worldview instead of their own.Furthermore, the world is very complex and to adequately describe all the knowledgethat comprises what is thought of as "common sense" would require a very largeontology (and in fact, such an ontology exists – it's called Cyc and it is solarge and complex that only experts can really use it today).
Even to describe the knowledge ofjust a single vertical domain, such as medicine, is extremely challenging. Tomake matters worse, the tools for authoring ontologies are still very hard touse – one has to understand the OWL language and difficult, buggy ontologyauthoring tools in order to use them. Domain experts who are non-technical andnot trained in formal reasoning or knowledge representation may find theprocess of designing ontologies frustrating using current tools. What is needed are commercial quality tools for buildingontologies that hide the underlying complexity so that people can just pourtheir knowledge into them as easily as they speak. That's still a ways off, butnot far off. Perhaps ten years at the most.
Of course the difficulty ofdefining ontologies would be irrelevant if the necessary ontologies alreadyexisted. Perhaps experts could define them and then everyone else could justuse them? There are numerous ontologies already in existence, both on thegeneral level as well as about specific verticals. However in my own opinion,having looked at many of them, I still haven't found one that has the rightbalance of coverage of the necessary concepts most applications need, andaccessibility and ease-of-use by non-experts. That kind of balance is arequirement for any ontology to really go mainstream.
Furthermore, regarding the presentcrop of ontologies, what is still lacking is standardization. Ontologists havenot agreed on which ontologies to use. As a result it's anybody's guess whichontology to use when writing a semantic application and thus there is a highdegree of ontology diversity today. Diversity is good, but too much diversityis chaos.
Applications that use differentontologies about the same things don't automatically interoperate unless theirontologies have been integrated. This is similar to the problem of databaseintegration in the enterprise. In order to interoperate, different applicationsthat use different data schemas for records about the same things, have to bemapped to each other somehow – either at the application-level or the data-level.This mapping can be direct or through some form of middleware.
Ontologies canbe used as a form of semantic middleware, enabling applications to be mapped atthe data-level instead of the applications-level. Ontologies can also be usedto map applications at the applications level, by making ontologies of Webservices and capabilities, by the way. This is an area in which a lot ofresearch is presently taking place.
The OWL language can expressmappings between concepts in different ontologies. But if there are manyontologies, and many of them partially overlap, it is a non-trivial task toactually make the mappings between their concepts.
Even though concept A inontology one and concept B in ontology two may have the same names, and evensome of the same properties, in the context of the rest of the concepts intheir respective ontologies they may imply very different meanings. So simplymapping them as equivalent on the basis of their names is not adequate, theirconnections to all the other concepts in their respective ontologies have to beconsidered as well. It quickly becomes complex. There are some potential waysto automate the construction of mappings between ontologies however – but theyare still experimental. Today, integrating ontologies requires the help ofexpert ontologists, and to be honest, I'm not sure even the experts have itfigured out. It's more of an art than a science at this point.
Darwinian Selection of Ontologies
All that is needed for mainstream adoption to begin is for a largebody of mainstream content to become semantically tagged andaccessible. This will cause whatever ontology is behind that content to become popular.
When developers see that there is significant content andtraction around aparticular ontology, they will use that ontology for their ownapplicationsabout similar concepts, or at least they will do the work of mappingtheir ownontology to it, and in this way the world will converge in a Darwinianfashionaround a few main ontologies over time.
These main ontologies will then beworth thetime and effort necessary to integrate them on a semantic level,resulting in acohesive Semantic Web. We may in fact see Darwinian natural selection take place not just at the ontology level, but at the level of pieces of ontologies.
A certain ontology may do a good job of defining what a person is, while another may do a good job of defining what a company is. These definitions may be used for a lot of content, and gradually they will become common parts of an emergent meta-ontology comprised of the most-popular pieces from thousands of ontologies. This could be great or it could be a total mess. Nobody knows yet. It's a subject for further research.
Making Sense of Ontologies
Since ontologies are so important,it is helpful to actually understand what an ontology really is, and what itlooks like. An ontology is a system of formally defined related concepts. Forexample, a simple ontology is this set of statements such as this:
A human is a living thing.
A person is a human.
A person may have a first name.
A person may have a last name.
A person must have one and only onedate of birth.
A person must have a gender.
A person may be socially related toanother person.
A friendship is a kind of socialrelationship.
A romantic relationship is a kindof friendship.
A marriage is a kind of romanticrelationship.
A person may be in a marriage withonly one other person at a time.
A person may be employed by anemployer.
An employer may be a person or anorganization.
An organization is a group ofpeople.
An organization may have a productor a service.
A company is a type organization.
We've just built a simple ontologyabout a few concepts: humans, living things, persons, names, socialrelationships, marriages, employment, employers, organizations, groups,products and services. Within this system of concepts there is particular logic,some constraints, and some structure. It may or may not correspond to yourworldview, but it is a worldview that is unambiguously defined, can becommunicated, and is internally logically consistent, and that is what isimportant.
The Semantic Web approach providesan open-standard language, OWL, for defining ontologies. OWL also provides fora way to define instances of ontologies. Instances are assertions within theworldview that a given ontology provides. In other words OWL provides a meansto make statements that connect information to the ontology so that softwarecan understand its meaning unambiguously. For example, below is a set ofstatements based on the above ontology:
There exists a person x.
Person x has a first name "Sue"
Person x has a last name "Smith"
Person x has a full name "Sue Smith"
Sue Smith was born on June 1, 2005
Sue Smith has a gender: female
Sue Smith has a friend: Jane, who isanother person.
Sue Smith is married to: Bob, anotherperson.
Sue Smith is employed by Acme, Inc, a company
Acme Inc. has a product, Widget2.0.
The set of statements above, plusthe ontology they are connected to, collectively comprise a knowledge basethat, if represented formally in the OWL markup language, could be understoodby any application that speaks OWL in the precise manner that it was intendedto be understood.
Making Metadata
The OWL language provides a way tomarkup any information such as a data record, an email message or a Web pagewith metadata in the form of statements that link particular words or phrasesto concepts in the ontology. When software applications that understand OWLencounter the information they can then reference the ontology and figure outexactly what the information means – or at least what the ontology says that itmeans.
But something has to add thesesemantic metadata statements to the information – and if it doesn't add them or adds thewrong ones, then software applications that look at the information will getthe wrong idea. And this is another challenge – how will all this metadata getcreated and added into content? People certainly aren't going to add it all byhand!
Fortunately there are many ways tomake this easier. The best approach is to automate it using special softwarethat goes through information, analyzes the meaning and adds semantic metadataautomatically. This works today, but the software has to be trained or providedwith rules and that takes some time. It also doesn't scale cost-effectively tovast data-sets.
Alternatively, individuals can beprovided with ways to add semantics themselves as they author information. Whenyou post your resume in a semantically-aware job board, you could fill out aform about each of your past jobs, and the job board would connect that data toappropriate semantic concepts in an underlying employment ontology. As anend-user you would just fill out a form like you are used to doing;under-the-hood the job board would add the semantics for you.
Another approach is to leveragecommunities to get the semantics. We already see communities that are addingbasic metadata "tags" to photos, news articles and maps. Already a few simpletypes of tags are being used pseudo-semantically: subject tags and geographicaltags. These are primitive forms of semantic metadata. Although they are notexpressed in OWL or connected to formal ontologies, they are at leastsemantically typed with prefixes or by being entered into fields or specificnamespaces that define their types.
Tagging by Example
There may also be another solution to the problem of how to add semantics to content in the not to distant future. Once asuitable amount of content has been marked up with semantic metadata,it may be possible, through purely statistical forms of machinelearning, for software to begin to learn how to do a pretty good job ofmarking up new content with semantic metadata.
For example, if thestring "Nova Spivack" is often marked up with semantic metadata statingthat it indicates a person, and not just any person but a specificperson that is abstractly represented in a knowledge base somewhere,then when software applications encounter a new non-semanticallyenhanced document containing strings such as "Nova Spivack" or"Spivack, Nova" they can make a reasonably good guess that thisindicates that same specific person, and they can add the necessarysemantic metadata to that effect automatically.
As more and more semanticmetadata is added to the Web and made accessible it constitutes a statisticaltraining set that can be learned and generalized from. Although humansmay need to jump-start the process with some manually semantic tagging,it might not be long before software could assist them and eventuallydo all the tagging for them. Only in special cases would software needto ask a human for assistance — for example when totally new terms orexpressions were encountered for the first several times.
The technology for doing this learning already exists — and actually it's not very different from how search engines like Google measure the community sentiment around web pages. Each time something is semantically tagged with a certain meaning that constitutes a "vote" for it having that meaning. The meaning that gets the most votes wins. It's an elegant, Darwinian, emergent approach to learning how to automatically tag the Web.
One this is certain, if communities were able to tagthings with more types of tags, and these tags were connected to ontologies andknowledge bases, that would result in a lot of semantic metadata being added tocontent in a completely bottom-up, grassroots manner, and this in turn would enable this process to start to become automated or at least machine-augmented.
Getting the Process Started
But making the userexperience of semantic tagging easy (and immediately beneficial) enough that regular people will do it, is a challenge that has yet to be solved.However, it will be solved shortly. It has to be. And many companies andresearchers know this and are working on it right now. This does have to be solved to get the process of jump-starting the Semantic Web started.
I believe that the Tools Problem – the lack of commercial grade tools forbuilding semantic applications – is essentially solved already (although theproducts have not hit the market yet; they will within a few years at most).The Ontology Problem is further from being solved. I think the way this problemwill be solved is through a few "killer apps" that result in the building up ofa large amount of content around particular ontologies within particular onlineservices.
Where might we see this content initially arising? In my opinion it will most likely be within vertical communities of interest, communities of practice, and communities of purpose. Within such communities there is a need to create a common body of knowledge and to make that knowledge more accessible, connected and useful.
The Semantic Web can really improve the quality of knowledge and user-experience within these domains. Because they are communities, not just static content services, these organizations are driven by user-contributed content — users play a key role in building content and tagging it. We already see this process starting to take place in communities such as Flickr, del.icio.us, the Wikipedia and Digg. We know that communities of people do tag content, and consume tagged content, if it is easy and beneficial enough for to them to do so.
In the near future we may see miniature Semantic Webs arising around particular places, topics and subject areas, projects, and other organizations. Or perhaps, like almost every form of new media in recent times, we may see early adoption of the Semantic Web around online porn — what might be called "the sementic web."
Whether you like it or not, it is a fact that pornography was one of the biggest drivers of early mainstream adoption of personal video technology, CD-ROMs, and also of the Internet and the Web.
But I think it probably is not necessary this time around. While, I'm sure that the so-called "sementic web" could become better from the Semantic Web, it isn't going to be the primary driver of adoption of the Semantic Web. That's probably a good thing — the world can just skip over that phase of development and benefit from this technology with both hands so to speak.
The World Wide Database
In some ways one could think of theSemantic Web as "the world wide database" – it does for the meaning of data records what theWeb did for the formatting documents. But that's just the beginning. It actually turnsdocuments into richer data records. It turns unstructured data into structureddata. All data becomes structured data in fact. The structure is not merelydefined structurally, but it is defined semantically.
In other words, it's notmerely that for example, a data record or document can be defined in such a wayas to specify that it contains a certain field of data with a certain label ata certain location – it defines what that field of data actually means in anunambiguous, machine understandable way. If all you want is a Web of data,XML is good enough. But if you want to make that data interoperable and machineunderstandable then you need RDF and OWL – the Semantic Web.
Like any database,the Semantic Web, or rather the myriad mini-semantic-webs that will comprise it,have to overcome the challenge of data integration. Ontologies provide a betterway to describe and map data, but the data still has to be described andmapped, and this does take some work. It's not a magic bullet.
The Semantic Webmakes it easier to integrate data, but it doesn't completely remove the dataintegration problem altogether. I think the eventual solution to this problemwill combine technology and community folksonomy oriented approaches.
The Semantic Web in HistoricalContext
Let's transition now and zoom out to see the bigger picture. The Semantic Webprovides technologies for representing and sharing knowledge in new ways. Inparticular, it makes knowledge more accessible to software, and thus to otherpeople. Another way of saying this is that it liberates knowledge fromparticular human minds and organizations – it provides a way to make knowledgeexplicit, in a standardized format that any application can understand. This isquite significant. Let's put this in historical perspective.
Before the invention of the printing press, there were two ways to spreadknowledge – one was orally, the other was in some symbolic form such as art orwritten manuscripts. The oral transmission of knowledge had limited range and ahigh error-rate, and the only way to learn something was to meet someone whoknew it and get them to tell you. The other option, symbolic communicationthrough art and writing, provided a means to communicate knowledgeindependently of particular people – but it was only feasible to produce a fewcopies of any given artwork or manuscript because they had to be copied byhand. So the transmission of knowledge was limited to small groups or at leastsmall audiences. Basically, the only way to get access to this knowledge was tobe one of the lucky few who could acquire one of its rare physical copies.
The invention of the printing press changed this – for the first timeknowledge could be rapidly and cost-effectively mass-produced and mass-distributed.Printing made it possible to share knowledge with ever-larger audiences. Thisenabled a huge transformation for human knowledge, society, government,technology – really every area of human life was transformed by thisinnovation.
The World Wide Web made the replication and distribution of knowledge eveneasier – With the Web you don't even have to physically print or distributeknowledge anymore, the cost of distribution is effectively zero, and everyonehas instant access to everything from anywhere, anytime. That's a lot betterthan having to lug around a stack of physical books. Everyone potentially haswhatever knowledge they need with no physical barriers. This has been anotherhuge transformation for humanity – and it has affected every area of humanlife. Like the printing press, the Web fundamentally changed the economics ofknowledge.
The Semantic Web is the next big step in this process – it will make all theknowledge of the human race accessible to software. For the first time,non-human things (software applications) will be able to start working withhuman knowledge to do things (for humans) on their own. This is a big leap – aleap like the emergence of a new species, or the symbiosis of two existingspecies into a new form of life.
The printing press and the Web changed the economics of replicating,distributing and accessing knowledge. The Semantic Web changes the economics ofprocessing knowledge. Unlike the printing press and the Web, the Semantic Webenables knowledge to be processed by non-human things.
In other words, humans don't have to do all the thinking on their own, theycan be assisted by software. Of course we humans have to at least first createthe software (until we someday learn to create software that is smart enough tocreate software too), and we have to create the ontologies necessary for thesoftware to actually understand anything (until we learn to create software thatis smart enough to create ontologies too), and we have to add the semanticmetadata to our content in various ways (until our software is smart enough todo this for us, which it almost is already). But once we do the initial work ofmaking the ontologies and software, and adding semantic metadata, the systemstarts to pick up speed on its own, and over time the amount of work we humanshave to do to make it all function decreases. Eventually, once the system hasencoded enough knowledge and intelligence, it starts to function withoutneeding much help, and when it does need our help, it will simply ask us andlearn from our answers.
This may sound like science-fiction today, but in fact it a lot of this isalready built and working in the lab. The big hurdle is figuring out how to getthis technology to mass-market. That is probably as hard as inventing thetechnology in the first place. But I'm confident that someone will solve iteventually.
Once this happens the economics of processing knowledge will truly bedifferent than it is today. Instead of needing an actual real-live expert, theknowledge of that expert will be accessible to software that can act as theirproxy – and anyone will be able to access this virtual expert, anywhere,anytime. It will be like the Web – but instead of just information beingaccessible, the combined knowledge and expertise of all of humanity will alsobe accessible, and not just to people but also to software applications.
The Question of Consciousness
The Semantic Web literally enables humans to share their knowledge with eachother and with machines. It enables the virtualization of human knowledge andintelligence. With respect to machines, in doing this, it will lend machines"minds" in a certain sense – namely in that they will at least be able tocorrectly interpret the meaning of information and replicate the expertise ofexperts.
But will these machine-minds be conscious? Will they be aware of themeanings they interpret, or will they just be automatons that are simplyfollowing instructions without any awareness of the meanings they areprocessing? I doubt that software will ever be conscious, because from what Ican tell consciousness — or what might be called the sentient awareness ofawareness itself as well as other things that are sensed — is an immaterialphenomena that is as fundamental as space, time and energy — or perhaps evenmore fundamental. But this is just my personal opinion after having searchedfor consciousness through every means possible for decades. It just cannot befound to be something, yet it is definitely and undeniably taking place.
Consciousness can be exemplified through the analogy of space (but unlikespace, consciousness has this property of being aware, it's not a mere lifelessvoid). We all agree space is there, but nobody can actually point to itsomewhere, and nobody can synthesize space. Space is immaterial andfundamental. It is primordial. So is electricity. Nobody really knows whatelectricity is ultimately, but if you build the right kind of circuit you canchannel it and we've learned a lot about how to do that.
Perhaps we may figure out how to channel consciousness like we channelelectricity with some sort of synthetic device someday, but I think that ishighly unlikely. I think if you really want to create consciousness it's mucheasier and more effective to just have children. That's something ordinarymortals can do today with the technology they were born with. Of course whenyou have children you don't really "create" their consciousness, it seems to bethere on its own. We don't really know what it is or where it comes from, orwhen it arises there. We know very little about consciousness today.Considering that it is the most fundamental human experience of all, it isactually surprising how little we know about it!
In any case, until we truly delve far more deeply into the nature of themind, consciousness will be barely understood or recognized, let aloneexplained or synthesized by anyone. In many eastern civilizations there aremulti-thousand year traditions that focus quite precisely on the nature ofconsciousness. The major religions have all universally concluded thatconsciousness is beyond the reach of science, beyond the reach of concepts,beyond the mind entirely. All those smart people analyzing consciousness for solong, and with such precision, and so many methods of inquiry, may have a pointworth listening to.
Whether or not machines will ever actually "know" or be capable of beingconscious of that meaning or expertise is a big debate, but at least we can allagree that they will be able to interpret the meaning of information and rulesif given the right instructions. Without having to be conscious, software willbe able to process semantics quite well — this has already been proven. It'sworking today.
While consciousness is and may always be a mystery that we cannot synthesize– the ability for software to follow instructions is an established fact. Inits most reduced form, the Semantic Web just makes it possible to providericher kinds of instructions. There's no magic to it. Just a lot of details. Infact, to play on a famous line, "it's semantics all the way down."
The Semantic Web does not require that we make conscious software. It justprovides a way to make slightly more intelligent software. There's a bigdifference. Intelligence is simply a form of information processing, for themost part. It does not require consciousness — the actual awareness of what isgoing on — which is something else altogether.
While highly intelligentsoftware may need to sense its environment and its own internal state andreason about these, it does not actually have to be conscious to do this. Theseoperations are for the most part simple procedures applied vast numbers of timeand in complex patterns. Nowhere in them is there any consciousness nor doesconsciousness suddenly emerge when suitable levels of complexity are reached.
Consciousness is something quite special and mysterious. And fortunately forhumans, it is not necessary for the creation of more intelligent software, noris it a byproduct of the creation of more intelligent software, in my opinion.
The Intelligence of the Web
So the real point of the Semantic Web is that it enables the Web to becomemore intelligent. At first this may seem like a rather outlandish statement,but in fact the Web is already becoming intelligent, even without the SemanticWeb.
Although the intelligence of the Web is not very evident at first glance,nonetheless it can be found if you look for it. This intelligence doesn't existacross the entire Web yet, it only exists in islands that are few and farbetween compared to the vast amount of information on the Web as a whole. Butthese islands are growing, and more are appearing every year, and they arestarting to connect together. And as this happens the collective intelligenceof the Web is increasing.
Perhaps the premier example of an "island of intelligence" is theWikipedia, but there are many others: The Open Directory, portals such as Yahooand Google, vertical content providers such as CNET and WebMD, commercecommunities such as Craigslist and Amazon, content oriented communities such asLiveJournal, Slashdot, Flickr and Digg and of course the millions of discussionboards scattered around the Web, and social communities such as MySpace andFacebook. There are also large numbers of private islands of intelligence onthe Web within enterprises — for example the many online knowledge andcollaboration portals that exist within businesses, non-profits, andgovernments.
What makes these islands "intelligent" is that they are places where people(and sometimes applications as well) are able to interact with each other tohelp grow and evolve collections of knowledge. When you look at them close-upthey appear to be just like any other Web site, but when you look at what theyare doing as a whole – these services are thinking.They are learning, self-organizing, sensing their environments, interpreting,reasoning, understanding, introspecting, and building knowledge. These are theactivities of minds, of intelligent systems.
The intelligence of a system such as the Wikipedia exists on several levels– the individuals who author and edit it are intelligent, the groups that helpto manage it are intelligent, and the community as a whole – which isconstantly growing, changing, and learning – is intelligent.
Flickr and Digg also exhibit intelligence. Flickr's growing system of tagsis the beginnings of something resembling a collective visual sense organ onthe Web. Images are perceived, stored, interpreted, and connected to conceptsand other images. This is what the human visual system does. Similarly, Digg isa community that collectively detects, focuses attention on, and interpretscurrent news. It's not unlike a primitive collective analogue to the humanfacility for situational awareness.
There are many other examples of collective intelligence emerging on theWeb. The Semantic Web will add one more form of intelligent actor to the mix –intelligent applications. In the future, after the Wikipedia is connected tothe Semantic Web, as well as humans, it will be authored and edited by smartapplications that constantly look for new information, new connections, and newinferences to add to it.
Although the knowledge on the Web today is still mostly organized withindifferent islands of intelligence, these islands are starting to reach out andconnect together. They are forming trade-routes, connecting their economies,and learning each other's languages and cultures. The next-step will be forthese islands of knowledge to begin to share not just content and services, butalso their knowledge — what they know about their content and services. The SemanticWeb will make this possible, by providing an open format for the representationand exchange of knowledge and expertise.
When applications integrate their content using the Semantic Web they willalso be able to integrate their context, their knowledge – this will make thecontent much more useful and the integration much deeper. For example, when anapplication imports photos from another application it will also be able toimport semantic metadata about the meaning and connections of those photos.Everything that the community and application know about the photos in theservice that provides the content (the photos) can be shared with the servicethat receives the content. Better yet, there will be no need for customapplication integration in order for this to happen: as long as both servicesconform to the open standards of the Semantic Web the knowledge is instantlyportable and reusable.
Freeing Intelligence from Silos
Today much of the real value of the Web (and in the world) is still lockedaway in the minds of individuals, the cultures of groups and organizations, andapplication-specific data-silos. The emerging Semantic Web will begin to unlockthe intelligence in these silos by making the knowledge and expertise theyrepresent more accessible and understandable.
It will free knowledge and expertise from the narrow confines of individualminds, groups and organizations, and applications, and make them not only moreinteroperable, but more portable. It will be possible for example for a personor an application to share everything they know about a subject of interest aseasily as we share documents today. In essence the Semantic Web provides acommon language (or at least a common set of languages) for sharing knowledgeand intelligence as easily as we share content today.
The Semantic Web also provides standards for searching and reasoning moreintelligently. The SPARQL query language enables any application to ask forknowledge from any other application that speaks SPARQL. Instead of merekeyword search, this enables semantic search. Applications can search forspecific types of things that have particular attributes and relationships toother things.
In addition, standards such as SWRL provide formalisms for representing andsharing axioms, or rules, as well. Rules are a particular kind of knowledge –and there is a lot of it to represent and share, for example proceduralknowledge, and logical structures about the world. An ontology provides a meansto describe the basic entities, their attributes and relations, but rulesenable you to also make logical assertions and inferences about them. Withoutgoing into a lot of detail about rules and how they work here, the importantpoint to realize is that they are also included in the framework. All forms ofknowledge can be represented by the Semantic Web.
Zooming Way, Waaaay Out
So far in this article, I've spenta lot of time talking about plumbing – the pipes, fluids, valves, fixtures,specifications and tools of the Semantic Web. I've also spent some time onillustrations of how it might be useful in the very near future to individuals,groups and organizations. But where is it heading after this? What is thelong-term potential of this and what might it mean for the human race on ahistorical time-scale?
For those of you who would prefer not to speculate, stop reading here. Forthe rest of you, I believe that the true significance of the Semantic Web, on along-term timescale is that it provides an infrastructure that will enable theevolution of increasingly sophisticated forms of collective intelligence. Ultimatelythis will result in the Web itself becoming more and more intelligent, untilone day the entire human species together with all of its software andknowledge will function as something like a single worldwide distributed mind –a global mind.
Just the like the mind of a single human individual, the global mind will bevery chaotic, yet out of that chaos will emerge cohesive patterns of thoughtand decision. Just like in an individual human mind, there will be feedbackbetween different levels of order – from individuals to groups to systems ofgroups and back down from systems of groups to groups to individuals. Becauseof these feedback loops the system will adapt to its environment, and to itsown internal state.
The coming global mind will collectively exhibit forms of cognition andbehavior that are the signs of higher-forms of intelligence. It will form andreact to concepts about its "self" – just like an individual human mind. Itwill learn and introspect and explore the universe. The thoughts it thinks maysometimes be too big for any one person to understand or even recognize them –they will be comprised of shifting patterns of millions of pieces of knowledge.
The Role of Humanity
Every person on the Internet will be a part of the global mind. Andcollectively they will function as its consciousness. I do not believe some newform of consciousness will suddenly emerge when the Web passes some thresholdof complexity. I believe that humanity IS the consciousness of the Web anduntil and unless we ever find a way to connect other lifeforms to the Web, orwe build conscious machines, humans will be the only form of consciousness ofthe Web.
When I say that humans will function as the consciousness of the Web I meanthat we will be the things in the system that know. The knowledge of theSemantic Web is what is known, but what knows that knowledge has to besomething other than knowledge. A thought is knowledge, but what knows thatthought is not knowledge, it is consciousness, whatever that is. We can figureout how to enable machines to represent and use knowledge, but we don't knowhow to make them conscious, and we don't have to. Because we are alreadyconscious.
As we've discussed earlier in this article, we don't need conscious machines, we just need more intelligent machines.Intelligence – at least basic forms of it – does not require consciousness. It may be the case that the very highest forms of intelligence require or are capable of consciousness. This may mean that software will never achieve the highest levels of intelligence and probably guaranteesthat humans (and other conscious things) will always play a special role in theworld; a role that no computer system will be able to compete with. We providethe consciousness to the system. There may be all sorts of other intelligent,non-conscious software applications and communities on the Web; in fact therealready are, with varying degrees of intelligence. But individual humans, andgroups of humans, will be the only consciousness on the Web.
The Collective Self
Although the software of the Semantic Web will not be conscious we can say that system as a whole contains or is conscious to the extent that human consciousnesses are part of it. And like most conscious entities, it may also start to be self-conscious.
If the Web ever becomes a global mind as I am predicting, will it have a"self?" Will there be a part of the Web that functions as its central self-representation?Perhaps someone will build something like that someday, or perhaps it will evolve.Perhaps it will function by collecting reports from applications and people inreal-time – a giant collective zeitgeist.
In the early days of the Web portals such as Yahoo! provided this function — they were almost real-time maps of the Web and what was happening. Today making such a map is nearly impossible, but services such as Google Zeitgeist at least attempt to provide approximations of it. Perhaps through random sampling it can be done on a broader scale.
My guess is that the global mind will need a self-representation at somepoint. All forms of higher intelligence seem to have one. It's necessary forunderstanding, learning and planning. It may evolve at first as a bunch ofcompeting self-representations within particular services or subsystems withinthe collective. Eventually they will converge or at least narrow down to just afew major perspectives. There may also be millions of minor perspectives thatcan be drilled down into for particular viewpoints from these top-level "portals."
The collective self, will function much like the individual self – as amirror of sorts. Its function is simply to reflect. As soon as it exists theentire system will make a shift to a greater form of intelligence – because forthe first time it will be able to see itself, to measure itself, as a whole. Itis at this phase transition when the first truly global collective self-mirroring function evolves, that we can say that the transition from a bunch of cooperating intelligent parts toa new intelligent whole in its own right has taken place.
I think that the collective self, even if it converges on a few majorperspectives that group and summarize millions of minor perspectives, will becommunity-driven and highly decentralized. At least I hope so – because theself-concept is the most important part of any mind and it should be designedin a way that protects it from being manipulated for nefarious ends. At least Ihope that is how it is designed.
Programming the Global Mind
On the other hand, there are times when a little bit of adjustment or guidance iswarranted – just as in the case of an individual mind, the collective selfdoesn't merely reflect, it effectively guides the interpretation of the pastand present, and planning for the future.
One way to change the direction ofthe collective mind, is to change what is appearing in the mirror of thecollective self. This is a form of programming on a vast scale – When thisprogramming is dishonest or used for negative purposes it is called "propaganda," but there are cases whereit can be done for beneficial purposes as well. An example of this today ispublic service advertising and educational public television programming. Allforms of mass-media today are in fact collective social programming. When yourealize this it is not surprising that our present culture is violent andmessed up – just look at our mass-media!
In terms of the global mind, ideally one would hope that it would be able tolearn and improve over time. One would hope that it would not have the collective equivalent of psycho-social disorders. To facilitate this, just like any form of higherintelligence, it may need to be taught, and even parented a bit. It also mayneed a form of therapy now and then. These functions could be provided by thepeople who participate in it. Again, I believe that humans serve a vital and irreplaceablerole in this process.
How It All Might Unfold
Now how is this all going to unfold? I believe that there are a number ofkey evolutionary steps that Semantic Web will go through as the Web evolvestowards a true global mind:
1. Representing individual knowledge. The first step is to make individuals'knowledge accessible to themselves. As individuals become inundated withincreasing amounts of information, they will need better ways of managing it,keeping track of it, and re-using it. They will (or already do) need"personal knowledge management."
2. Connecting individual knowledge. Next, once individual knowledge isrepresented, it becomes possible to start connecting it and sharing it acrossindividuals. This stage could be called "interpersonal knowledgemanagement."
3. Representing group knowledge. Groups of individuals also need ways ofcollectively representing their knowledge, making sense of it, and growing itover time. Wikis and community portals are just the beginning. The Semantic Webwill take these "group minds" to the next level — it will make the collective knowledge ofgroups far richer and more re-usable.
4. Connecting group knowledge. This step is analogous to connectingindividual knowledge. Here, groups become able to connect their knowledge togetherto form larger collectives, and it becomes possible to more easily access andshare knowledge between different groups in very different areas of interest.
5. Representing the knowledge of the entire Web. This stage — what might becalled "the global mind" — is still in the distant future, but atthis point in the future we will begin to be able to view, search, and navigatethe knowledge of the entire Web as a whole. The distinction here is thatinstead of a collection of interoperating but separate intelligentapplications, individuals and groups, the entire Web itself will begin tofunction as one cohesive intelligent system. The crucial step that enables thisto happen is the formation of a collective self-representation. This enablesthe system to see itself as a whole for the first time.
How it May be Organized
I believe the global mind will be organized mainly in the form of bottom-up and lateral, distributed emergent computation andcommunity — but it will be facilitated by certain key top-down services thathelp to organize and make sense of it as a whole. I think this future Web willbe highly distributed, but will have certain large services within it as well– much like the human brain itself, which is organized into functionalsub-systems for processes like vision, hearing, language, planning, memory,learning, etc.
As the Web gets more complex there will come a day when nobody understandsit anymore – after that point we will probably learn more about how the Web isorganized by learning about the human mind and brain – they will be quitesimilar in my opinion. Likewise we will probably learn a tremendous amountabout the functioning of the human brain and mind by observing how the Webfunctions, grows and evolves over time, because they really are quite similarin at least an abstract sense.
The internet and its software and content is like a brain, and the state ofits software and the content is like its mind. The people on the Internet arelike its consciousness. Although these are just analogies, they are actuallyuseful, at least in helping us to envision and understand this complex system. Asthe field of general systems theory has shown us in the past, systems at verydifferent levels of scale tend to share the same basic characteristics and obeythe same basic laws of behavior. Not only that, but evolution tends to convergeon similar solutions for similar problems. So these analogies may be more thanjust rough approximations, they may be quite accurate in fact.
The future global brain will require tremendous computing and storageresources — far beyond even what Google provides today. Fortunately as Moore's Law advances thecost of computing and storage will eventually be low enough to do thiscost-effectively. However even with much cheaper and more powerful computingresources it will still have to be a distributed system. I doubt that therewill be any central node because quite simply no central solution will be ableto keep up with all the distributed change taking place. Highly distributed problemsrequire distributed solutions and that is probably what will eventually emergeon the future Web.
Someday perhaps it will be more like a peer-to-peer network, comprised ofapplications and people who function sort of like the neurons in the human brain.Perhaps they will be connected and organized by higher-level super-peers orsuper-nodes which bring things together, make sense of what is going on andcoordinate mass collective activities. But even these higher-level serviceswill probably have to be highly distributed as well. It really will bedifficult to draw boundaries between parts of this system, they will all beconnected as an integral whole.
In fact it may look very much like a grid computing architecture – in whichall the services are dynamically distributed across all the nodes such that atany one time any node might be working on a variety of tasks for differentservices. My guess is that because this is the simplest, most fault-tolerant,and most efficient way to do mass computation, it is probably what will evolvehere on Earth.
The Ecology of Mind
Where we are today in this evolutionary process is perhaps equivalent to therise of early forms of hominids. Perhaps Austrolapithecus or Cro-Magnon, ormaybe the first Homo Sapiens. Compared to early man, the global mind is like the rise of 21stcentury mega-cities. A lot of evolution has to happen to get there. But itprobably will happen, unless humanity self-destructs first,which I sincerely hope we somehow manage to avoid. And this brings me to afinal point. This vision of the future global mind is highly technological;however I don't think we'll ever accomplish it without a new focus on ecology.
Ecology probably conjures up images of hippies and biologists, or maybehippies who are biologists, or at least organic farmers, for most people, but infact it is really the science of living systems and how they work. And anysystem that includes living things is a living system. This means that the Webis a living system and the global mind will be a living system too. As a living system, the Web is an ecosystem and is alsoconnected to other ecosystems. In short, ecology is absolutely essential tomaking sense of the Web, let alone helping to grow and evolve it.
In many ways the Semantic Web and the collective minds, and the global mind,that it enables, can be seen as an ecosystem of people, applications,information and knowledge. This ecosystem is very complex, much like naturalecosystems in the physical world. An ecosystem isn't built, it's grown, andevolved. And similarly the Semantic Web, and the coming global mind, will notreally be built, they will be grown and evolved. The people and organizationsthat end up playing a leading role in this process will be the ones thatunderstand and adapt to the ecology most effectively.
In my opinion ecology is going to be the most important science anddiscipline of the 21st century – it is the science of healthysystems. What nature teaches us about complex systems can be applied to everykind of system – and especially the systems we are evolving on the Web. Inorder to ever have a hope of evolving a global mind, and all the wonderfullevels of species-level collective intelligence that it will enable, we have tonot destroy the planet before we get there. Ecology is the science that cansave us, not the Semantic Web (although perhaps by improving collectiveintelligence, it can help).
Ecology is essentially the science of community – whether biological,technological or social. And community is a key part of the Semantic Web atevery level: communities of software, communities of people, and communities ofgroups. In the end the global mind is the ultimate human community. It is thereward we get for finally learning how to live together in peace and balancewith our environment.
The Necessity of Sustainability
The point of this discussion of the relevance of ecology to the future ofthe Web, and my vision for the global mind, is that I think that it is clearthat if the global mind ever emerges it will not be in a world that is anythinglike what we might imagine. It won't be like the Borg in Star Trek, it won't belike living inside of a machine. Humans won't be relegated to the roles ofslaves or drones. Robots won't be doing all the work. The entire world won't becoated with silicon. We won't all live in a virtual reality. It won't be one ofthese technological dystopias.
In fact, I think the global mind can only come to pass in a much greener,more organic, healthier, more balanced and sustainable world. Because it willtake a long time for the global mind to emerge, if humanity doesn't figure outhow to create that sort of a world, it will wipe itself out sooner or later,but certainly long before the global mind really happens. Not only that, butthe global mind will be smart by definition, and hopefully this intelligencewill extend to helping humanity manage its resources, civilizations andrelationships to the natural environment.
The Smart Environment
The global mind also needs a global body so to speak. It's not going to bean isolated homunculus floating in a vat of liquid that replaces the physicalworld! It will be a smart environment that ubiquitously integrates with ourphysical world. We won't have to sit in front of computers or deliberatelylogon to the network to interact with the global mind. It will be everywhere.
The global mind will be physically integrated into furniture, houses,vehicles, devices, artworks, and even the natural environment. It will sensethe state of the world and different ecosystems in real-time and alert humansand applications to emerging threats. It will also be able to allocateresources intelligently to compensate for natural disasters, storms, andenvironmental damage – much in the way that the air traffic control systemsallocates and manages airplane traffic. It won't do it all on its own, humansand organizations will be a key part of the process.
Someday the global mind may even be physically integrated into our bodiesand brains, even down the level of our DNA. It may in fact learn how to curediseases and improve the design of the human body, extending our lives, sensorycapabilities, and cognitive abilities. We may be able to interact with it bythought alone. At that point it will become indistinguishable from a limitedfrom of omniscience, and everyone may have access to it. Although it will onlyextend to wherever humanity has a presence in the universe, within thatboundary it will know everything there is to know, and everyone will be able toknow any of it they are interested in.
Enabling a Better World
By enabling greater forms of collective intelligence to emerge we really arehelping to make a better world, a world that learns and hopefully understandsitself well enough to find a way to survive. We're building something thatsomeday will be wonderful – far greater than any of us can imagine. We're helpingto make the species and the whole planet more intelligent. We're building thetools for the future of human community. And that future community, if it ever arrives,will be better, more self-aware, more sustainable than the one we live intoday.
I should also mention that knowledge is power, and power can be used forgood or evil. The Semantic Web makes knowledge more accessible. This puts more power in the hands of the many, not just the few. As long as we stick to this vision — we stick to making knowledge open and accessible, using open standards, in as distributed a fashion as we can devise, then the potential power of the Semantic Web will be protected against being coopted or controlled by the few at the expense of the many. This is where technologists really have to be socially responsible when making development decisions. It's important that we build a more open world, not a less open world. It's important that we build a world where knowledge, integration and unification are balanced with respect for privacy, individuality, diversity and freedom of opinion.
But I am not particularly worried that the Semantic Web and the future globalmind will be the ultimate evil – I don't think it is likely that we will end upwith a system of total control dominated by evil masterminds with powerfulSemantic Web computer systems to do their dirty work. Statistically speaking, criminal empires don't last very long because theyare run by criminals who tend to be very short-sighted and who also surroundthemselves with other criminals who eventually unseat them, or theyself-destruct. It's possible that the Semantic Web, like any other technology,may be used by the bad guys to spy on citizens, manipulate the world, and doevil things. But only in the short-term.
In the long-term either our civilization will get tired of endlesssuccessions of criminal empires and realize that the only way to actuallysurvive as a species is to invent a form of government that is immune to beingtaken over by evil people and organizations, or it will self-destruct. Eitherway, that is a hurdle we have to cross before the global mind that I envisioncan ever come about. Many civilizations came before ours, and it is likely thatours will not be the last one on this planet. It may in fact be the case that adifferent form of civilization is necessary for the global mind to emerge, andis the natural byproduct of the emergence of the global mind.
We know that the global mind cannot emerge anytime soon, and therefore, ifit ever emerges then by definition it must be in the context of a civilizationthat has learned to become sustainable. A long-term sustainable civilization is a non-evil civilization. And that is why I think it is a safebet to be so optimistic about the long-term future of this trend.
Scrybe — A Beautiful Ajax Organizer App
This online video preview of the upcoming Web-based organizer, Scrybe. The app has an unusually elegant and innovative AJAX interface. It's beautifully designed. Watch the video.
Extremely Cool — Sony Invention Links Digital and Physical World
This is an extremely cool video of a beautifully designed interface that connects physical objects and digital objects in a new way. You can drag things off of your computer, right onto your table, and then from there connect them to physical objects, like a book, which can then be moved around causing the digital objects they are linked with to also move. You have to see it to understand. Watch the video. Love it.
Interesting Idea: Start a Magazine that is a Wiki
I was reading this article in Wired magazine about wikis, where the article itself is a wiki that the readers can contribute to — and an idea occurred to me. What if you could make an entire magazine that was in a fact a wiki? This magazine would be published online via a Website running a wiki engine. Every issue would be by and for the community of readers. There would be an editorial group among the readers that would decide what to write articles about for the next issue of the magazine, and then the community would work to write the articles. To get into the editorial group, remain there, and have a vote as an editor, a community member would have to make a certain number of (non-spurrious) contributions to articles on an ongoing basis (and/or maintain a certain reputation in the community as measured in some other manner).
I can imagine this idea taking off and a lot of these "wikazines" forming around various subject areas. It makes sense that communities of people who are interested in subjects could help to research and write about them. Of course in such communities there would be some people who put more effort in than others, and some who were more like readers or lurkers. But it would still be much more involving than old "one-way media."
In some ways communities like Digg simulate this — people essentially vote on what is interesting and this filters up to become the featured content on the site. But that is still one step removed from the creative process itself — only the readers participate, not the content authors. What's interesting about this proposal is that it blurs the distinction between an author and a reader, and provides a way for a magazine to be truly emergent and community-driven. OK, I'm too busy to start this, but I hope someone out there on the lazyweb takes this idea and runs with it. Please let me know if you find examples of this.
What is Radar Networks up to?
Shel Israel and I just finished up working together for 10 days. I needed Shel's perspective on what we are working on at Radar Networks. Shel lived up to his reviews as a brilliant thinker on strategic messaging, branding and positioning. So what are the 15 people at Radar Networks working on? It's still a secret, but yes, it's related to the Semantic Web, and yes, Shel has hinted on his blog at some of it. But it's probably not what you think. And, no, it's not semantic video blogging either. More hints later on. For now, if you are a blogger and you have a wish-list for what wikis or blogs could do next, feel free to submit your list in the comments on this post: I'm doing some informal market research…
[Corrected due to typo.]
Cool Collective Intelligence Group Drawing Game
Check out The Broth — it's a "global mosaic" in which you can move tiles around in real time with other people to create emergent artworks. It's really cool to watch images grow and morph from the combined imagination of people around the Net. Beautiful.