Blank (Media) Slate

I realize I’m showing up (fashionably) late to the semantic web party, but the timing seems to feel ripe. As I mentioned in an earlier post about what I call a “Semantic Servant“, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to (easily) cross-connect online systems. Despite the zealot debates between the Web 2.0 / 3.0 / Semantic Web crowds, there’s a lot to be gained from cooperative growth.

For example, I found this post about “Pinging the Semantic Web” by Harry Chen. In it he mentions there’s a lot to be learned from the blog pinging services:

As the Semantic Web grows, we also need similar services. Ping.SemanticWeb.Org is an experimental service for notifying search engines (or semantic web bots) about changes made in semantic web documents. The present service accepts pings from semantic web documents that describe SIOC, FOAF and DOAP.

He goes on to give some rationale behind his belief in this type of system. My personal favorite is his second point:

Second, a wide adoption of ping services can help to speed up the convergence of standard ontologies. In the blogosphere, we have seen the convergence of few RSS standards, which I believe is due to the wide adoption of ping services, as well as RSS readers and blog publishing software. If Semantic Web ping services are widely used, I believe it’s only nature for SWD publishers to adopt few standard ontologies that are supported by the ping services, and not to create the owner ontologies.

As much as I hate to admit it, the semi-formalization of RSS did for online content sharing what HTML did for Internet content publishing in general. What I mean by that is sometimes it takes an example of technology deployed in a useful context to propel it into mainstream adoption. There’s no reason why we need RSS to share content (we could simply use straight XML, or even straight HTML), but it certainly makes it easier — especially if everyone adopts it.

Now, all we need to do is come up with “an example technology deployed in a useful context.” Piece of cake.

This may not be a totally revolutionary idea, but it’s something I’d love to see implemented. The end state of the proposed application would be to deploy what I call a “Semantic Servant” that provide guidance for searching and indexing. I’m terming it a “servant” rather than a “server” for the basic reason that I see it as a “helper tool” to existing servers rather than serving up content itself.

Without getting into it too deeply, the concept is that the Semantic Servant (via a new “Semantic Servant Index Protocol”) would reply on a specified port to provide a machine readable summary of the content available from another server. For example, if a web site is available at “http://www.contentsite.com”, the servant would reply on the same URL via something like “ssip://www.contentsite.com”. The results would be an XML packet including rules for leveraging the content on the sister site.

Keep in mind that this is a totally half-baked idea. My goal in this concept would be to empower a website developer with a tool that would, with a few minor configuration clicks, tell spiders/bots/indexers/etc. more about the associated site. In order for this to work, the servant application would have to be incredibly light weight and easy to use out-of-the-box. Assuming the servant defaults to a standard OWL, RDF, etc. standard configuration, the administrator could select from some pre-canned configurations and let it go.

The more time the administrator spends customizing the configuration, of course, the more fine-tuned it could be to the content of the specific site. In this way, though, indexers visiting the site would (a) have more information about the content of the site than is currently (easily) available, and (b) changes to the site would be more forgiving.

This is, of course, assuming that producers of web content want their information to be aggregated more freely. If a site producer wants to force all of it’s users to it’s front gate, this isn’t the solution for them. As I think we’re moving to an “All Content Everywhere” model, though, whereby there are multiple ways to experience the same content, I see something like this as an eventual must-have.

… then again, I’m a dreamer.

If we’re all moving toward a more connected set of tools for communication with hopes of a better Web 3.0, how’re we gonna’ get there? Getting everyone to agree on a single standard seems like a pipedream, but what can we do in the meantime? From what I can tell, it seems relatively easy to chat up the concept of Microformats.

I bumped into this post from Tom Johnson which seemed to sum it up well:

The idea of microformats and the semantic web sound cool. And I’m looking forward to the day when microformats are widely adopted. But if microformats are so useful, why hasn’t Google come out with a microformats search yet? Why aren’t microformats being baked into the core structure of WordPress and other blogging platforms?

Not many people are using the structured blogging plugins, and those that do use it mainly to autoformat their posts. I even heard in a recent interview with Matt Mullenweg, the WordPress lead, that there are no current plans to develop structured blogging microformats into the WordPress code.

Oddly enough, Jason Kolb made a similar comment in a recent post:

The only technology that would really be necessary to make this work is to embed microformats in site text itself. I’m really not sure why this hasn’t taken off yet, it seems like a no-brainer to me. What I’m talking about, and I’ve actually posted some working examples of this before, is to surround chunks of text from a weblog post or text published to a public site with microformat markup so that it can be extracted as meaningful data.

It seems like a simple enough first step toward the semantic web thing. Like these two cats, I’m relatively surprised microformatting hasn’t been embraced, but I do believe the value chain still seems to be missing a couple links. There probably need to be a couple of successes (like a popular microformat tagging/retrieval tool) before the masses jump on board.

For my part in this digital village, I’m going to actively explore more microformatting opportunities. More if it develops.

For those of you following the Semantic Web debate, I’m sure you’ve got an opinion about it. Few people I talk to seem to be indifferent to it; they tend to be either an ontology cheerleader or are highly skeptical it’ll be possible to get everyone on board. There’s a related (and often confused) discussion between the relationship between it and Web 3.0 (fortunately, I think the dust is starting to settle on that argument).

Now, for the reason of this post. I just wanted to draw attention to what I believe to be the most cogent description of the Semantic Web and it’s attendant accoutrements. Specifically, some of the on-point posts in Nova Spivak’s blog, Minding the Planet. He’s an excellent communicator, and presents well-reasoned comments (ie. not vitriolic rhetoric), even though he does have an agenda to promote his stealth-mode Radar Networks company which appears positioned squarely in the Semantic Web space.

While you could browse through his blog to find the nuggets, here’s a short list of posts I’ve found to be interesting:

• Minding The Planet — The Meaning and Future of the Semantic Web
• What is the Semantic Web, Actually?
• Does the Semantic Web = Web 3.0?
• Web 3.0 Versus Web 2.0
• Web “Me2.0″ — Exploding the Myth of Web 2.0
• Web 3.0 Roundup: Radar Networks, Powerset, Metaweb and Others…
• Breaking the Collective IQ Barrier — Making Groups Smarter

These posts and the Wikipedia articles seem to be as good a primer on the concepts as are to be found. Flavors of the debate range outside these, of course (and everyone seems to have some opinion about them), but I’d say, “FiDO, we’re go for Semantic Web.” (Realizing there might be some scrubs along the way to T-0.)