Tim Berners-Lee, in his blog recently made a very insightful observation about the next phase of conceptual layout of the web and its connections. TBL coined GGG (aptly named as Giant Global Graph) to distinguish from the World Wide Web - and what it meant.
Tim observed that "It's not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important". Many industry practitioners have observed that "objects" mean a lot more than "data". When expressing a problem, objects and their relationships can have far better value than data and files.
Web was/is the world's filesystem - where we could find things quickly. The Internet was categorized by Yahoo (in a failed effort), tagged by Google (effectively) - and today we can instanly access information from anywhere in the world without thinking about where it comes from. C:\ became http://.
Semantic web has been having trouble getting serious due to its closeness with Artifical Intelligence - and related expectations. The dream of machines running the world is still not any closer to reality. The hope is that the RDF layer on XML may possibly give better direction to a machine than just URLs from the Web.
For example, in social networks FOAF (Friend of a friend) relationships may be represented in a machine readable form using simple XML files (called RDF). Representing relationships in machine readable format (just as we do in databases) have value. Eventually the machines may be able to make intelligent references based on connections represented in the relations- and eventually deliver some results. This was the expectation under which XML technologies was developed circa 1996, and after 10 years we are getting somewhere.
However, semantic web almost screeches to a halt after this step. Success in practical Ontology, feasible Modal Logic and Axiology (even remotely) has been appalling. Not surprising. NP complete problems are NP complete - intelligence is not purely XML driven. Intelligence is more than a graph, with aspects overlaid, and experiences to glue. Tackling true intelligence is a dream.
We sometimes forget the real use of data - that of providing value to humanity in various forms, and providing true functionality as the humans need it. Connections are good, but functionality is paramount. The fact that a company can store ticket information on the web is not sufficient, but the user being able to buy it is significant. A company storing data is not sufficient, it being able to sieve out information from it, transforming it into knowledge, and converting to action is paramount. Somewhere along this, functionality becomes the significant aspect.
URLs are becoming more potent with XML wrappers (RDF/OWL/SPARQL) around it. The new generation of applications will be playing on these enhancers to achieve seamlessness that we have sorely been lacking in the last 25 years.
The WebTop is becoming more significant than the desktop. Browsers that were a mere window to the world may become a real wide entrance to the world itself. In a very short time, local resources on a computer may have no significance in how users achieve functionality.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
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9 comments:
Very insightful post. If your database analogy is to be followed, then where will the next web be?
November 26th, 2007
Who is afraid of the GGG?
Posted by Paul Miller @ 5:30 am
http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/?p=419
Nodalities:
From Semantic Web to Web of Data
---------------------------------
http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/2007/11/who_is_afraid_of_the_ggg.php
“today we can instanly access information from anywhere in the world without thinking about where it comes from. C:\ became http://.”
Truly stated that we are now moving from Desktop to WebTop. That also means that the informations that were kept hidden in the desktops are now slowly moving to the worldwide web. Albums, documents, even the personal profiles are now open to the public. You see a lot of big & small social sites like Face book, Orkut sharing their user’s profiles. Do you see any danger on this current trend?
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Great post.
I can see the introduction of web 3.0 having just as great of an effect as the introduction of the Internet itself.
But i have two things i would like to see in the future, some of which has already started to have been mentioned in the OP.
1) people should be free from their computer. computers should just be a "window" to the Internet. Users would have accounts set up on web servers (which could include their own local computer if they choose), so they can log in anywhere and access their things from everywhere. Software should not be downloaded hundreds of times but should be hosted on web servers and used when needed. This insures that everything is up to date. This concept has already started to be implemented to some degree, like when sites link their user's profiles with other sites.
2) This one is kinda like rss in a way, because what i'm thinking of takes one singular resource and treats it like a resource, which doesn't necessarily a way to present it. This goes especially well with my first idea. If there was this live video of whatever, and people wanted to do things to the video in real time, like maybe somebody would want just a small croping of the video, maybe add some visual effects to it, whatever - they wouldn't need to do any tedious work with copying or modifying the video or anything - they could just make instructions as to how the client should do these things to the resource and the client user would see the video just as people now use html and css to tell the client how the webpage creator wants them to see the text. The resource can be anything - video, media, text, data, anything. And it doesn't just go for viewing the resources neither. If there was a person, possibly in the live video i was mentioning, who had a button that everytime he pushed it the computer would make take the video that was recorded from the live feed from the last time he pushed the button and make it a new chapter on a dvd, and then add that chapter to the dvd menu. And also finish things up by making a thumbnail of the video clip, and set it as a button in the dvd menu. Users can then download the dvd whenever they want. It's an odd example but lets go with it. This is all done automatically, just because this task was programmed into the computer. I mean, once these instructions were conceived no more user input was required.
These two things are already possible, but so is everything described in web 3.0. I have also thought that maybe what i mentioned in number two leads to web-based computing as i mentioned in number one. When a user tries to access a large web application on a web server that contains large, widely used libraries, the web server that hosts the application does not need to pass any of those libraries on to the user. The server can just tell the client to go it and give instructions as to how to put it all together. tools that are used in larger applications need not be configured, as the application can tell the client how to correctly use the tool for a specific purpose.
What i am saying is kinda based off of the idea of web 3.0. I'm saying that the fundamental data is completely separate from the way it is presented (2), that the instructions as to how to present that data, and that data itself should not be copied more than it is needed (1), and that the what is done with the data should not be repeated many times - or something like that (2).
Here we are discussing web 3.0 and i am already thinking of web X.0 where X is greater than three. But to me it looks as though my web 4.0 needs to wait on some other areas of computing to develop. Silly issues like who gets to decide who uses what groups of ones and zeros and to what price.
I guess nobody can say what the future holds unless you help in making it happen. These are my thoughts at least.
I must admit, useful information.
CMS design
"C:\ became http://"
"In a very short time, local resources on a computer may have no significance in how users achieve functionality."
Someone at Google heard you.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html
I don't know if you do, but I feel uncomfortable with AI guys, starting (and perhaps mainly) by the name of their discipline itself. "Intelligence"... is so arrogant! And I think this is what makes them to tend to draw illusory targets on the horizon, like creating Disney-movie robots, etc.
Great article. Thanks!
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