I just finished listening to an excellent interview with Nova Spivak, the CEO of Radar Networks, and I must say that I'm very impressed with his visionary thinking and current thoughts on the state of web3.0 and semantic web technology.
Clearly we are at a crossroads and I agree that 2007 could be the year that we go into production with web2.0 and begin to really build out a production quality web3.0 platform and start to roll it out to the masses. Enough with the betas already. [Mini-rant- Let's engineer quality code first and release it later instead of the current trend in web2.0-beta-land.]
I thought I'd post some of my recent thoughts, questions, and insights on the semantic web and web3.0, as I think the interweb is about to get turned upside down and start folding in on itself, like a protein molecule in a much larger & increasingly complex strand of DNA.
Topic 1: We have the standards, do we have the tools to build semantic web apps on the web3.0 platform?
I think the tools are still a bit immature, lacking, and hard to use, but they are evolving. While I have not used this tool yet, I've heard that the the TopBraid Composer 2.0 is perhaps the best commercially available tool on the market right now and there are others coming, but the development projects I'm seeing are still very AJAXY in nature and aren't necessarily focusing on cleaning up the metadata and adding semantic web features and capabilities [yet].
The #1 issue right now seems to be answering the question: How do you build a massively scalable storage and query engine that can scale to support growth in the hundreds of billions of RDF triples range and the high volume of r/w queries to interact with them? Maybe we need to start looking at complex biological, geospatial, and astronomical systems that can approach the same orders of scale and magnitude to draw upon how they function and exist. I don't know. Totally speculating here. I'm currently liking the discussion on 3d visualization for semantic web triples.
Topic 2: Can we build interfaces that my mom and grandmother can use, while collecting enough metadata to feed the semantic web machine? What about privacy concerns?
What if I don't want your app to capture every single click I take through it? Or maybe I do? I don't know. What's the right level of user interaction that should warrant the implicit (or explicit) use and collection of RDF triples?
How can we make our apps brain dead simple enough so that end users can even comprehend the benefits that this next gen of apps will bring? I have a hard enough time explaining this stuff to my geek friends, let alone my mother. Can we really build interfaces that are seamless and hide the underlying complexities of the semantic web engine from the average joe? I'm not sure that we can.
How can we encourage users to participate in the read/write web3.0 database and actively contribute semantically rich content? Can we really bring this technology down to a common level so that all users -- on a global scale -- can benefit, while actively contributing to the growth of the semantic web database?
I realize that there are more questions than answers in this blurb, but I am really struggling with this topic and am not convinced that we can build a web3.0 platform that can be adopted by the masses on GLOBAL scale [yet].
For example, it frustrates the hell out of me that when I do a technorati search for "web3.0" the majority of results that come back are in other languages that I don't understand. If I'm to understand the power of the semantic web and web3.0 platform, then I would expect this query to return results that I can read and understand.
I don't want to have to go to google translate, copy and paste the url, and get some less than perfect translation that currently only allows me to translate to/from one language at a time. Will semantic web and web3.0 really solve this problem? I really hope so, but I think we are a LONG LONG way from achieving this goal.
Topic #3 - What can we leverage / bring over from the web2.0 platform?
LOTS!!!!! I think the most important aspects of web2.0 that will fuel the web3.0 fire include: mashups, public apis, web sites as web services, social networking techniques, tagging systems & folksonomies, socially-driven software, leveraging the wisdom of crowds, crowdsourcing, the collective intelligence, and the good 'ole "unintended consequences" or use of web2.0 features in new or unconventional ways.
Ouch. Now my head hurts.
I'll leave this post with a link to my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged with web3.0.
0 comments:
Post a Comment