Many people believe that desktop software will become irrelevant as we enter the age of Web 2.0. This seems to be plausible, at least to those of us who worked in technology. However, if we step back and think from an everyday user’s perspective, a different picture emerges.
Jay Larock, a Senior Product Manager at Corel Corporation, wrote an interesting essay that argues why desktop software is still relevant in the age of Web 2.0. His argument is as the follows.
The New York Times has an interesting article on how Web-based map tools are reshaping “the mapmaking business”. The thesis of this article is something that we are all familiar with: On the Web, anyone can be a mapmaker.
There is something intrigue about amateurs making maps on the Web. They make maps not because they want to chart new territories or help others to navigate in the physical world. But rather, they create new maps to tell stories and organize information that otherwise would be forgotten or lost.
For example:
James Lamb of Federal Way, Wash., created a map to illustrate the spread of graffiti in his own town and ask other residents to contribute to it.
I highly recommend this article. We (people who work in the geospatial technology field) often think too much about the technology aspect of the map tools, and pay little attention to the kind of social impact that was brought about by the technology. It’s time to see a bigger picture and reflect. Reading this article will help us to do that just that.
Kochukoshy Cheruvettolil posted the following question on LinkedIn Answers:
Does anybody know of a practical implementation of Semantic Web Technologies?
I’m looking for an example of something that demonstrates what is unique to the semantic technologies - not something that could as easily be implemented using conventional methods.
Jeffery Pollock gave his view on the issue.
I know similar questions have been discussed many times in the past. Since it appeared in LinkedIn, a somewhat business-oriented community, I mention it here just in case readers of Planet RDF may want to join the discussion and do some cross-domain information exchange.
The 2nd International ExpertFinder Workshop: Finding Experts on the Web with Semantics (FEW2007) will be co-located with ISWC 2007 in Busan, Korea on November 12th, 2007.
ExpertFinder is an emerging collaborative
initiative with the aim of devising vocabulary, rule extensions (for e.g. FOAF and SIOC) and best practices to annotate personal home pages, as well as web pages of institutions, conferences, publication indexes, etc. with adequate metadata to enable computer agents to find experts on particular topics.
I think FEW2007 will be an interesting workshop.
People search is a growing niche market on the Web. While nearly 50% of all web searches are done on Google, there is no clear winners in many of vertical search domains (e.g., travel, health and people).
Startup Spock is a leader in the people search domain (others include Pipl, PeekYou and Wink). Spock currently builds its database by scanning Web sites that people regularly post information about themselves and others, e.g., LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook.
I think Semantic Web ontology like FOAF and SIOC will play important role in the development of people search engine. First, we have tons of FOAF and SIOC data running wild on the Web. Second, FOAF and SIOC allow more expressive representation of social network information. Third, people profiles described using these ontologies are more suitable for logical inference. It can help to enable knowledge fusion and data mining. Finally, publishing people profiles and social network information in RDF is less involved than publishing API for accessing back-end databases.
If all social network sites adopt FOAF as the standard vocabulary for expressing user profile, it will be easy for someone to build mashups of social networks across multiple sites (e.g., MySpace + Facebook + LinkedIn). Furthermore, if we treat each user profile as an RDF graph, we will be able to exploit SPARQL query services to query distributed data on the Web and begin to ask complex questions about our human social networks.
Snoggle is a graphical, SWRL-based ontology mapper. It’s developed by folks at BBN Technologies. Ontology mapping is the process of aligning semantics between multiple ontologies. Many people believe that ontology mapping is an inevitable future of the Semantic Web because distinctive system ontologies need to aligned before data from different systems can be fused to achieve seamless semantic integration.
Snoggle attempts to solve the ontology mapping problem by providing a graphical user interface (similar to which of the Microsoft Visio) to guide the process of ontology vocabulary alignment. In Snoggle, user-defined mappings can be serialized into rules, which is expressed using SWRL.
Snoggle is an Open Source project with a standard BSD license. Latest source code and binaries are available for download at SemWebCentral.org.
The upcoming SOCoP meeting will feature a demonstration of the Snoggle tool. In particular, it will show how Snoggle can be used to solve ontology mapping problems in the geospatial domain.
Related links:
Mapplets are widgets can be added to Google Maps. It’s a new way to create mashups. Instead of creating separate Web pages for the mashup applications, using Mapplets, new functionality can be dynamically injected into the standard Google Maps web page. In general this is a good news to all mashup developers. It provides a new platform for innovation. However, this brings back an old issue: privacy. First, when using Google Maps as a mashup platform, developers are effectively giving Google all information that is used by or can be inferred from their Mapplet applications. It’s hard to predict what Google will do with this information. Second, do end-users have control over what information is sent to third-party Mapplets? Third, can hackers exploit Mapplets to inject malicious scripts to monitor the computing activities of Google Maps users? While I don’t discourage people from using Google Maps or Google Mapplets, but privacy is an issue that people must be aware of. This is an extremely critical issue. Especially it’s because our Web Browsers are beginning to act like an Operating System.
SDForum will host a panel discussion on the topic “Will Web 3.0 Finally Give Developers a Read Model Driven Architecture Solution?”. Panelists include Deborah McGuinness (Stanford KSL) and Elisa Kendall (Sandpiper Software). This panel will be moderated by AJ Chen (Healthline.com) and Jeffery Pollock (Oracle).
In this interactive panel discussion we will explore how the Semantic Web family of standards is quietly empowering the decades-old MDA (Model Driven Architecture) community. Despite 20+ years of promises from the software community, the original vision of CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) seems just as elusive as ever. However, recent activities in the past 18 months at the OMG (Object Management Group) indicate that another watershed moment for MDA is upon us. So, the question remains, can the Semantic Web and Web 3.0 technology like OWL (Web Ontology Language) and RDF (Resource Description Framework) substantially improve the ways we conceptualize, design, code, and generate enterprise software?
Event information:
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Spotted on: SICOP-Forum