The Meaning of Open Source

On Linux Journal.

Adding Some SPARQL to the Semantic Web

On Open Enterprise blog.

A Moot of Folksonomies

Being a rigorous sort of chap, I was sceptical about folksonomies - ad-hoc tags. But over time I've come to appreciate their power - and the fact that once people start using them routinely, the combined body of folksonomic knowledge becomes quite impressive.

But the obvious question is: what lies beyond the simple tag? Myabe this kind of thing:

GroupMe! extends the idea of social tagging systems like del.icio.us, Flickr or BibSonomy by introducing the group dimension. The foundation of social tagging systems are so-called folksonomies, which describe how users (folks) tag resources (e.g. photos, videos, publications, etc.). In technical terms a folksonomy is just a collection of tag assignments:

(User, Tag, Resource) = User has tagged Resource with Tag at a particular time.

Over time it is likely that semantics emerge, e.g. tags that are often assigned to same resources may be synonyms. Hence, folksonomies are promising to improve (web) search, etc. With GroupMe!'s approach of taggable groups we extend tag assignments with a group dimension:

(User, Tag, Group, Resource) = User has tagged Resource with Tag in a certain Group at a particular time.

This prompts the next question: what do we call these groups? I vote a "moot".

Tim B-L: On Moving from the WWW to the GGG

Tim Berners-Lee is an inconic figure for a reason: he's actually rather sharp. This makes his rare blog posts important and interesting - none more so than his most recent one about the Giant Global Graph (GGG):

In the long term vision, thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildy differing devices which will give us access to the system. Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That's what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary.

This is probably the best thing I've read about social graphs, not least because it anchors a trendy idea in several pre-existing areas of serious Webby development. (Via Simon Willison's Weblog.)

Infoethics, Open Access, ODF and Open Source

Now here's something you might not expect from UNESCO every day:

The Infoethics Survey of Emerging Technologies prepared by the NGO Geneva Net Dialogue at the request of UNESCO aims at providing an outlook to the ethical implications of future communication and information technologies. The report further aims at alerting UNESCO’s Member States and partners to the increasing power and presence of emerging technologies and draws attention to their potential to affect the exercise of basic human rights. Perhaps as its most salient deduction, the study signals that these days all decision makers, developers, the corporate scholar and users are entrusted with a profound responsibility with respect to technological developments and their impact on the future orientation of knowledge societies.

It touches on a rather motley bunch of subjects, including the semantic Web, RFID, biometrics and mesh networking. But along the way it says some sensible things:

One primary goal of infoethics is to extend the public domain of information; that is, to define an illustrative set of knowledge, information, cultural and creative works that should be made available to every person.

Even more surprising, to me at least, was this suggestion:

UNESCO should meanwhile support open standards and protocols that are generated through democratic processes not dominated by large corporations.

The use of OpenDocument Format and other open formats should also be encouraged as they help mitigate lock-in to certain technologies. Other initiatives to consider include pursuing free and open software, as well as the “Roadmap for Open ICT Ecosystems” developed last year.

(Via Heise Online.)

A Framework for Web Science

That's the title: as dull as ditchwater. The abstract sounds machine-generated:

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.

But since it comes from Sir Tim, it is, almost by definition, important. At least it's all available online.

Searching for an Edge

Search lies at the heart of modern desktop computing (just ask Google). So if free software wants to make a breakthrough on the desktop, coming up with a better search tool might just be the way to do it. Perhaps this could help.

One that Fled the Coop...

...without me noticing: Google Coop. It seems to be a tagging effort that provides cuts of Google searches. In doing so, it goes some way to turning the Web into the Semantic Web.

It's Good to Talk

Web 2.0 is all about conversations, they say. So clearly what we need is a search engine for conversations. Enter Talk Digger:

Talk Digger is a web application developed by Frédérick Giasson that helps users to find, follow and join conversations evolving on the Internet.

Talk Digger greatly evolved in 2006. I[t] started being a comparative search engine using the link-back feature of many search engines. Then it evolved in a full-scale meta-search engine reporting web sites linking to another web site. Then it evolved in a search engine of its own: a "conversation search engine" with feature helping the creation of communities around each conversation.

(Via eHub.)

The Semantic Newspaper

Here's a typically thoughtful meditation from Techdirt that considers ways in which newspapers could usefully embrace not just the Internet, but its more advanced technologies like the Semantic Web. It's an interesting idea, but I fear we may have to wait a while to see it implemented by any of the big names, even the savvy ones (yup, that's you, Guardian.)

Open Tools for the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is a kind of intelligent Web, one that consists not just of contextless numbers and meaningless words but of data that means something:

The Semantic Web is a web of data. There is lots of data we all use every day, and its not part of the web. I can see my bank statements on the web, and my photographs, and I can see my appointments in a calendar. But can I see my photos in a calendar to see what I was doing when I took them? Can I see bank statement lines in a calendar?

Why not? Because we don't have a web of data. Because data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps it to itself.

The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for interchange of data, where on the original Web we only had interchange of documents. Also it is about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.

Tim thinks it's going to be really big, which is good enough for me.

But to use all this richness, we're going to need tools, so it's good to seem some open source ones coming along. Doubly good, because they're from a company, Aduna, that has seen the free software light. (Via Enterprise Open Source Magazine.)