Group items tagged

This text sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures. A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development. These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way to focus its development on key communicational and representational requirements. The text surveys central engineering issues, such as the development of the Semantic Web, Web services and P2P. Analytic approaches to discover the Web's topology, or its graph-like structures, are examined. Finally, the Web as a technology is essentially socially embedded; therefore various issues and requirements for Web use and governance are also reviewed.

"The semantic web proposes to inject machine meaningful data into the existing human language oriented web. As part of this effort, on the semantic web, URIs are used to identify entities. But there is currently no standard way to specify what it is that any given URI is to identify, or to whom, or when. Recent work in linguistics offers ideas for a solution to this lack. It focuses on the pragmatics of actual language use among ensembles of people. Also, the World Wide Web provides a set of technologies, in the form of socially constructed web sites, that could be employed to provide a solution. In this paper, I suggest how such socially constructed web sites could be used to address the problem of establishing common ground among a community of machines of the referent of a URI used on the semantic web. The result is a proposal to automate social meaning by creating societies of machines that share knowledge representations identified by URIs."

What tagging does point to convincingly is the social aspect of naming. In a given natural language, many sorts of identifiers, such as common words, are socially centralized. Other sorts of identifiers, such as proper names, are socially decentralized, varying from local context to local context. Black has noticed a correspondence between this socially grounded identification process and the use of socially constructed Web sites.

I hope that "Smarter" is going to be a key tag for the Web 3.0, and yet I think "More Open, More Ubiquitous, with even More Information (Overload) and a little Smarter" is what it's really going to be. We'll have to wait till "Web 4.0" for a web that really is stepwise more intelligent, one that could really be called semantic and hold the hidden promises of a "Semantic Web". And the reason I believe this is that the community is focused on linking more stuff together in new ways and breaking down data siloes, much more than it is focused on creating new, smarter filters for all the data that's going to be made accessible that way.

The Semantic Web isn't just about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data. Like the web of hypertext, the web of data is constructed with documents on the web. However, unlike the web of hypertext, where links are relationships anchors in hypertext documents written in HTML, for data they links between arbitrary things described by RDF,. The URIs identify any kind of object or concept. But for HTML or RDF, the same expectations apply to make the web grow: 1. Use URIs as names for things 2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names. 3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information. 4. Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.

RPI's Tetherless World Constellation will address this emerging area of "Web Science," focusing on the World Wide Web and it's future use. Faculty in the constellation will explore the research and engineering principles that underlie the Web, will enhance the Web's reach beyond the desktop and laptop computer, and will develop new technologies and languages that expand the capabilities of the Web. We will use powerful scientific and mathematical techniques from many disciplines to explore the modeling of the Web from network- and information- centric views. Our goals will include making the next generation web natural to use while being responsive to the growing variety of policy and social needs, whether in the area of privacy, intellectual property, general compliance, or provenance. The Tetherless World Constellation will design new techniques to explore social, scientific, and legal impacts of the evolving technologies deployed on the Web.

People are changing the way that they consume online information, as well as their expectations about its delivery. The social nature of the Web brings with it an expectation of interaction with information and modern Web design is reflecting that. There are now alternate forms of navigation including the ability to browse by user, tag clouds, tabbed navigation etc. Advances in technology along with these shifts in user expectations are affecting the way that information is laid out on a webpage. Today's websites are aiming for intuitive and usable interfaces which are continuously evolving in response to user needs. Website designers are approaching information design differently and designing simple, interactive websites which incorporate advancements in Web interface design, current Web philosophies, and user needs. Information design for the New Web is simple, it is social, and it embraces alternate forms of navigation.

Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)-the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references-and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and-on many major research and library sites-find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one's personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). And it can be used offline as well (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi).

Last week, I participated in a WWW2007 panel called "Multimedia Metadata Standards in a Semantic Web 3.0", where I took the opportunity to declare the Semantic Web dead. As you can imagine, such a declaration in front of a crowd of semantic web researchers provoked many responses. While I believe panels should be provocative and entertaining, I also have specific reasons for why I went as far as calling the Semantic Web "dead". Let me explain what I mean.

"URIs, a universal identification scheme, are different from human names insofar as they can provide the ability to reliably access the thing identified. URIs also can function to reference a non-accessible thing in a similar manner to how names function in natural language. There are two distinctly different relationships between names and things: access and reference. To confuse the two relations leads to underlying problems with Web architecture. Reference is by nature ambiguous in any language. So any attempts by Web architecture to make reference completely unambiguous will fail on the Web. Despite popular belief otherwise, making further ontological distinctions often leads to more ambiguity, not less. Contrary to appeals to Kripke for some sort of eternal and unique identification, reference on the Web uses descriptions and therefore there is no unambiguous resolution of reference. On the Web, what is needed is not just a simple redirection, but a uniform and logically consistent manner of associating descriptions with URIs that can be done in a number of practical ways that should be made consistent. "

A great review of the challenges that follow from using URIs for both access and reference

A system and method for organizing knowledge in such a way that humans can find knowledge, learn from it, and add to it as needed is disclosed. The exemplary system has four components: a knowledge base, a learning model and an associated tutor, a set of user tools, and a backend system. The invention also preferably comprises a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow these components to work together, so that other people can create their own versions of each of the components. In the knowledge web a community of people with knowledge to share put knowledge in the database using the user tools. The knowledge may be in the form of documents or other media, or it may be a descriptor of a book or other physical source. Each piece of knowledge is associated with various types of meta-knowledge about what the knowledge is for, what form it is in, and so on. The information in the knowledge base can be created specifically for the knowledge base, but it can also consist of information converted from other sources, such as scientific documents, books, journals, Web pages, film, video, audio files, and course notes. The initial content of the knowledge web comprises existing curriculum materials, books and journals, and those explanatory pages that are already on the World Wide Web. These existing materials already contain most of the information, examples, problems, illustrations, even lesson plans, that the knowledge web needs. The knowledge base thus represents the core content (online documents or references to online or offline documents); the meta-knowledge that was created at the time of entry; and a number of user annotations and document metadata that accumulate over time about the usefulness of the knowledge, additional user opinions, certifications of its veracity and usefulness, commentary, and connections between various units of knowledge.

"Ambiently is a startup company developing web discovery engine applications. Envisioning the broad usage and benefits of creating a page-centric "ambient web" for every page on the web, Ambiently aims to create a new, richer web browsing and search experience for all web users."

PMOG is an infinite game built on individual network histories, transforming our web surfing into ongoing social play. With a game head-up display in Firefox, players can bomb each other, wage war over web sites, and lead other users on web missions. Ordinary web sites become caches for items and currency. PMOG fuses an MMO into our WWW. PMOG stands for Passively Multiplayer Online Game. Players play without playing; clicking around the internet turns into experience points and currency. This unconventional massively multiplayer online game merges your web life with an alternate, hidden reality. The mundane takes on a layer of fantastic achievement. Player behavior generates characters and alliances, triggers interactions in the environment, and earns the player points to spend online beefing up their inventory. Suddenly the internet is not a series of untouchable exhibits, but a hackable, rewarding environment.

OntoWebber is a Web site management system, which facilitates the creation, generation and maintenance of Web sites. Using OntoWebber, site engineers can build site models for domain-specific Web sites. The site models are based on explicit ontologies including the domain ontology and four distinct site-modeling ontologies. Using a RDF-aware rule engine, rules can be defined to check integrity constraints on the resulting site models, thus enforcing desirable properties of the materialized Web site. Both ontologies and site models are expressed using RDF(S)/XML languages. Rules are defined in the F-logic format. The prototype system provides an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for site engineers to performed all the above tasks for managing Web sites.

Zimbra is open source server and client software for messaging and collaboration - email, group calendaring, contacts, and web document management and authoring. The Zimbra server is available for Linux, Mac OS X, appliances, and virtualization platforms. The Zimbra Web 2.0 Ajax client runs on Firefox, Safari, and IE, and features easy integration / mash-ups of web portals, business applications, and VoIP using web services.

With the economy in a slump and budgets being cut in traditional print and TV advertising campaigns many will be looking to the Web 2.0 world to reach their constituents. So what should be on your Web 2.0 radar for 2009? Web 2.0 gurus give you the low down.

The Web is ephemeral. Pages change frequently, and it is nearly impossible to find data or follow a link after the underlying page evolves. We present Zoetrope, a system that enables interaction with the historical Web (pages, links, and embedded data) that would otherwise be lost to time. Using a number of novel interactions, the temporal Web can be manipulated, queried, and analyzed from the context of familar pages. Zoetrope is based on a set of operators for manipulating content streams. We describe these primitives and the associated indexing strategies for handling temporal Web data. They form the basis of Zoetrope and enable our construction of new temporal interactions and visualizations.

DeepPeep is a search engine specialized in Web forms. The current beta version tracks 13,000 forms across 7 domains. DeepPeep helps you discover the entry points to content in Deep Web (aka Hidden Web) sites, including online databases and Web services.

On Clipmarks.com, you can see clips of text, images or video about all sorts of topics that other people find while surfing the web. The idea is that through each other, we can learn more, know more and enjoy more than we could possibly do alone. As you find people who post clips that interest you, make them a Guide. Think of your Guides as a team of web editors you choose to consistently deliver you clips of things they find on the web.

A user can start a Web crawl through 80legs's Web-based interface. The form on the company's site lets them set parameters for the project and upload custom code needed to control how the crawler does its job. For example, a user might want the crawler to find images and check them against a database of copyrighted ones. Deysarkar says his company's crawlers are capable of processing up to two billion pages a day. The company charges $2 for every million pages crawled, plus a fee of three cents per hour of processing used.

A user can start a Web crawl through 80legs's Web-based interface. The form on the company's site lets them set parameters for the project and upload custom code needed to control how the crawler does its job. For example, a user might want the crawler to find images and check them against a database of copyrighted ones. Deysarkar says his company's crawlers are capable of processing up to two billion pages a day. The company charges $2 for every million pages crawled, plus a fee of three cents per hour of processing used.

The Web Science Research Initiative brings together academics, scientists, sociologists, entrepreneurs and decision makers from around the world. These people will create the first multidisciplinary research body to examine the World Wide Web and offer the practical solutions needed to help guide its future use and design.