Another interesting post by Nova, who is the founder of a semantic web company called Radar Networks, wherein Nova talks about how the web is evolving into a sort of collective intelligence:

“I think that these trends are all combining, and going real-time. Effectively what we’re seeing is the evolution of a global collective mind, a theme I keep coming back to again and again. This collective mind is not just comprised of humans, but also of software and computers and information, all interlinked into one unimaginably complex system: A system that senses the universe and itself, that thinks, feels, and does things, on a planetary scale.”

The quote and the post only go skin deep (at least for me) but if you are really interested in digging deeper, and have a few minute to read a brilliant seminal post on this topic, Nova wrote this one a while back. This was, for sure, one of those posts that just makes you dream; I found myself spacing out and thinking about “the global mind” and “collective intelligence” for days after reading this one.

“The planet-sized “Web” computer is already more complex than a human brain and has surpassed the 20-petahertz threshold for potential intelligence as calculated by Ray Kurzweil. In 10 years, it will be ubiquitous. So will superintelligence emerge on the Web, not a supercomputer?”

I also like this chart which Nova produced, which alludes to a potential evolutionary path for the web:

As always, I don’t really give much credence to the timelines we tend to attach to these types of predictions, as the web has continually proven us wrong; things just move so much quicker than we expect, that I think we will have this type of collective intelligence much sooner than the timelines that Nova talks about (50-100 years in the first post I linked to).

wolframAlpha logotype

wolframAlpha is supposed to go online this month; a search engine that aims to be better than google. well, there have been many search engines that stated to be better than google, why should this one be? because its founder is stephen wolfram, well known physicist, mathematician and founder of the software Mathematica.

stephen wolfram published an article on particle physics at age 16, entered Oxford University at age 17 and wrote a widely cited paper on heavy quark production at age 17. he received his ph.d. in particle physics from caltech at age 20 (wikipedia)… now you know, why we computer geeks are waiting for wolframAlpha to go online.

nova spivack, CEO and founder of Radar Networks, already had the chance to take a look at WolframAlpha. he stated the following: “It’s not a Google killer — it does something different. It answers questions. It’s an answer engine rather than a search engine. [...] The Wolfram|Alpha engine differs from traditional search engines in that it does not simply return a list of results based on a query, but instead computes an answer. (more)”

sounds promising and exciting. lets see what stephen has to show us… http://www.wolframalpha.com

By The Impressionist

What is Web 3.0?

According to Nova Spivack, it is the coming together of “statistics, linguistics, open data, computer intelligence, the wisdom of crowds and user-generated content.”

How effective do you think it will be as an educational tool?

Spavick feels that although potential investors may not see themselves adopting the semantic web, it may still be relevant to whatever other sector they put their money into.

However, Philip Trwoga, a principal lecturer at the University of Westminster, School of Informatics, feels that Web 3.0 as an educational tool would work well.

But he has some doubt about it: “The downside is a ‘Google for brains syndrome’.

-Chinaka Iwunze, The Impressionist

Have your say, ‘Wisdom of Crowds’- tell everyone what you think

Forum One - Online Community Business Forum

I really wanted to ‘live-blog’ from the Forum One’s Online Community Business Forum today, but the wireless access was less than desirable so I am settling for ’same-day’ blogging.

Today’s first session was with Thor Muller (Valley Swag and GetSatisfaction.com) and Nova Spivak (Twine.com) on thriving in a challenging economy.

Thor started out with an excellent analog of the “buffalo culture” or doing more in a land of less which is what the Native Americans who lived in the Plains perfected.  The Native Americans learned to use the whole animal and he developed 6 themes around this topic:

Hidden value – Just like the Native Americans used the whole buffalo, we must apply these techniques to today’s environment by taking the trash and turning it into shiny objects.  One suggestion was to move customer service beyond a cost center focus.

Integrated value of the tribe – Native American tribes had a communal set of values that they incorporated into everything they did and were as natural as breathing.

Be migratory – You have to go where the buffalo are.  One example is Comcast’s Comcast Cares unit that is a triage swat rapid response team that quick addresses customer issues.

Gathering of tribes – Everyone must depend more on collaboration when times are tough and may even mean collaborating with possible ‘enemies’ to share ideas and grow the market together.

Adaptation - People need to adapt when in tough times or when technology changes how they think.  Thor used the example of Twitter and how writing 140 character messages now seems very natural to those who have used Twitter for a month or more.

Reverence - Metrics are important, but we sometimes strip  out the reverence with a total devotion to the numbers.  Being reverent is doing things that don’t need to necessarily translate to transactions or sales, but doing the right thing and it’s the only thing that can sustain a community in the long term.

Nova Spivak then shared his experiences of building the Twine community which now has over 1 million members with just 24 people in his entire company and only 2 devoted to supporting the community.  As a venture-funded started, the key is to conserve cash, keep the team together using salary cuts instead of layoffs and using viral marketing instead of paid campaigns.  He also mentioned that there should be more opportunities for community sites in a down market especially for communities that energize people around the economic crisis.  In downtimes, people also need more support and have more ‘free’ time to network on community sites.  In addition, many companies are looking for ways to collaborate in less expensive ways than face-to-face meetings.

Wolfram Alpha

So when is the last time you couldn’t figure out an answer to a question? Most of us would go straight to Google and type in our question and browse the results until we find an appropriate answer. The only problem with this, is that most of time we would have to sift through all the results, some of them that have nothing to do with question to find the correct answer. This process might become a lot easier with the release of Wolfram Alpha.

Wolfram Alpha is the next “Google Killer” according to a few journalists. From what I have read it might be the next Wikipedia killer. Wolfram Alpha is sort of like a Google/Wikipedia hybrid. Unlike Google who returns answers based on keywords, Wolfram will actual compute your question to find an appropriate answer. For example, when I search for “The average amount of mile driven by an American from 2003-2008” Google comes up with, 2,690 results, and the first result doesn’t have anything to do with driving. David Berkowitz did the same thing by searching “average rainfall Belize 2003-2008 January February march,” , and he came up with multiple results that did not have to do with anything regarding his question.

So you are probably asking how does Wolfram work? According to Nova Spivack’s (CEO of Twine) interview with Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Alpha’s founder) Wolfram uses “built-in models of fields of knowledge, complete with data and algorithms, that represent real-world knowledge”. I am pretty sure they also use magic and Stephen Hawking.

So here is the big question. Will Wolfram Alpha actually be a “Google Killer”? In my opinion NO (this is coming from someone who hasn’t played with it yet). I feel that Google is so engulfed into our culture that it will take a major cultural change to over throw Google from the “Throne of Search”. Will Wolfram give Google a run for their money? I think so! Unlike most of the (semantic) Search Engines Wolfram actually answer the questions of providing better search to its users. But unlike Search Engines Wolfram cannot answer general or vague questions like “how many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie roll pop?” or “What kind of car should I buy”? I feel that Wolfram will bring a new style of search that will answer direct question more appropriately (something the Search Engines have yet to figure out). Hopefully this will drive more innovation within the Search community, which will give us a better Internet experience.

Auch die NZZ hat sich mit dem vermeintlichen Google-Killer beschäftigt, der zur Zeit über Blogs kräftig ins Rampenlicht gerückt wird. “Derjenige, der da Google übertrumpfen und mittels künstlicher Intelligenz allem Unwissen den Garaus machen will, wurde als wissenschaftliches Wunderkind bekannt, hat sich an den besten Universitäten hervorgetan und hat als Programmierer eine technisch komplexe, kommerziell erfolgreiche Software geschaffen. Es ist der Ruhm des britischen Physikers Stephen Wolfram, der dieser Tage unzählige Online-Journalisten und Blogger dazu bringt, die Begriffe Google-Killer, neuartige Suchmaschine, künstliche Intelligenz wieder einmal in einem Satz zusammenzubringen”, so die NZZ. Ob Wolfram-Alpha halten kann, was Blogger vermuten, steht auf einem anderen Blatt. Der Suchmschinen-Genius selbst beschreibt die neue Suchmaschine als “computational knowledge system”, als Wissensberechnungsmaschine. “Ausserhalb von Wolfram Research, der Firma, die Mathematica und Alpha entwickelt, hat bis jetzt nur ein einziger Mensch – Nova Spivack – die neue Suchmaschine ausprobieren können”, schreibt die NZZ. Das ist doch ein kluger PR-Schachzug. Spivack ist so euphorisch, als sei eben gerade eine neue bewusstseinserweiternde Droge entdeckt worden: Wolfram Alpha sei nicht eine Suchmaschine, sondern eine Antwort-Maschine. Das ist aber keine Sensation. Denn auch KI-Forscher wie Professor Wolfgang Wahlster vom DFKI oder das Fraunhofer Institut drehen an dieser Schraube. Darüber habe ich schon mehrfach berichtet. Und auch die Semantic Web-Experten von Google verweilen nicht im Tiefschlaf. Mit Mike Cohen, seinen früheren Nuance-Mitarbeitern, Franz Och und vielen anderen Spezialisten hat Google einige gute Leute an Bord.

Schon jetzt sei Google gar nicht so schlecht, meint die NZZ. Auch diese Suchmaschine kann schwierige Fragen mit wenigen Ziffern beantworten. Füttert man Google beispielsweise mit der Frage aller Fragen, der allerletzten Frage, und schreibt: ‘The answer to life, the universe and everything’, erhält man als Antwort: ‘42′. Wie man beim englischen Science-Fiction-Autor Douglas Adams nachlesen kann, ist diese Antwort korrekt, dies sei tatsächlich die allerletzte Antwort”. Allerdings gerate in Vergessenheit, welches die dazu passende allerletzte Frage war. So werde man dann halt vielleicht Wolframs Answer Machine eine Frage-Maschine zur Seite stellen müssen, orakelt die NZZ und hat nicht ganz Unrecht. Siehe auch meinen Blog-Beitrag vor ein paar Tagen.

Eine neue Suchmaschine versetzt angeblich die Blogosphäre in Aufregung. Das berichtet die Financial Times Deutschland. Der Wissenschaftler Stephen Wolfram soll einen “Google-Killer” entwickelt haben. “Doch den glaubten vor ihm schon viele erfunden zu haben”, so die FTD.

“Da schreibt Nova Spivack, Suchmaschinenexperte aus San Francisco, einen begeisterten Blogeintrag über Professor Wolframs neueste Entwicklung. Über eine Suchmaschine, die angeblich spezifische, sachbezogene Fragen viel präziser beantworten kann als jede andere Suchmaschine”, berichtet die FTD.

Sein Dienst könnte nach Meinung von Suchmaschinenexperten nicht nur sehr nützlich, sondern im Internet auch einflussreich werden. “Aber ein Google ist Wolfram Alpha deswegen noch nicht, auch wenn Spivack seinen Blogeintrag vollmundig mit ‘Wolfram Alpha kommt – und es könnte so wichtig wie Google sein’ überschreibt. Was genau kommt, wird die Welt erst im Mai wissen, wenn die Website an den Start geht”, führt die FTD weiter aus.

Das Rätsel ist auch schnell entlüftet, denn das Ganze soll als Antwortmaschine funktionieren – läuft also auf den Pfaden von semantischen Technologien. Sie wird, anders als Google, auf eine Suchanfrage nicht einfach Links auflisten, die eine Antwort auf die Frage des Nutzers enthalten könnten. Stattdessen analysiert die Technologie Fragen, auf die es sachbezogene Antworten gibt – und liefert diese. Sie soll eine große Auswahl in “natürlicher” Sprache gestellter Fragen beantworten können, schreibt Spivack, der vergangene Woche zwei Stunden mit Wolfram gesprochen hat und sich dessen Onlineservice vorführen ließ. Ja toll. Konzepte für die so genannte Antwortmaschine werden an vielen Stellen zur Zeit entwickelt. In Deutschland arbeitet das Deutsche Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz am Web 3.0-Standard. Mit dem von der Bundesregierung geförderten Projekt Theseus soll die Marktreife erreicht werden. Auch bei Google. Ich habe darüber schon mehrfach berichtet. So einfach lassen sich die Google-Forscher nicht die Butter vom Brot nehmen. Bei der Sprachsteuerung sind die Jungs nur schwer zu toppen. Weiteres hier.

0. Motivation

This post is written in the agony of realization. The painful realization that months and months of work may possibly have been a wasted effort on my part – as well as on the part of others.

Index

1. The Past
   1. The Promised Land
   2. The Arrival
   3. The Breakdown
2. The Present
3. The Future
4. Addendum (I)
5. Addendum (II)
6. References

And so the story begins…

1. The Past

1.1 The Promised Land

I do not recall where the name first came up. And it wasn’t immediately clear to me what the significance of the name was. Regardless of how or why, I somehow found myself on a mysterious web page for a new startup company touting in vague terms a social web service like no other.

It was Twine.

I remember seeing a good looking front page, linking to a beta candidate signup form. Scanning the description of the service, I found several buzzwords that had been on my radar for years. Including RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL and friends. All good stuff from the realm of Knowledge Representation (KR). The ethereal plane from where truth, or at least probabalistic truth, could be found. A place where all knowledge is broken down into statements, also known as triples, forming (directed acyclic) graphs of interconnected nodes in a truly compositional way.

This (KR) was the kind of stuff I had studied on my own while specializing my education. As with programming language concepts, data structure concepts were just as fascinating. KR data comes with it’s own semantics and a so-called inference engine takes the higher facts (logic) with the lower facts and uses these to form new facts. One example is transitivity; say there two facts in the knowledge base: a contains b and b contains c (well actually there are more facts, like the fact that contains is a transitive relation), then it is possible to infer that a contains c. This is a very useful fact, it can be useful in many different contexts. Having the semantics infrastructure able to make this kind of inference for programmers is a huge win and enables one to reason much more abstractly about things. Of course with great expressive power comes great computational cost and so there are downsides to this as well but as with so many other things, there is a computational gradient that one can adjust to choose the expressiveness to fit ones patience and wallet (in terms of hardware).

Needless to say, it took only seconds to sign up, I was hooked. This service was truly breaking new ground, bringing together a KR-driven web service to the masses. Such vision and audacity deserves a pad on the shoulder. Being tired of small incremental steps that infest thinking everywhere, Twine was treading new ground, giving a big “FU” to conventional and short-sighted thinking, driven by superficial gadgetry and purely social aspects and pointless time wasting games (no, I shall not name that nameless service, of which I too, for a week no less, was a member).

1.2 The Arrival

Time went and the day arrived where I got that glorious mail. I signed up to the beta service as an enthusiastic and somewhat skittish beta tester. It took me some time to find my way around. The UX is and was somewhat messy. The concepts behind the service though – not so.

Twine was (yes, I say was, because it has since then been crippled in various ways, although also extended) defined as a fusion of concepts – a new paradigm

- a social network of users
- a semantic bookmarking service

The first part is quite obvious. There is a community of users using this service, these users are able to send eachother messages. That makes up for the very basic aspects of having a social network, anything less than that and you can’t call it social. There’s more to it than that, but first I need to address the second point.

The second part is the novel aspect of Twine. It is the bookmarking service. With Twine, one does not just bookmark pages, one bookmarks types of pages. Twine has two different kinds of bookmarklets – a useless one (called the basic bookmarklet) and the useful one (called the advanced bookmarklet); alright, that is not fair, the basic one is useful, but it is meaningless to use it in the face of the advanced bookmarklet, which is really a necessity for “power” users that bookmark a lot.

So what does it mean to recognize type of a page? It means for example that if you find yourself on the page of YouTube, looking at some fine video of a nice car. Then when you press the bookmarklet on your browser links panel, and remember a bookmarklet is just a piece of code that executes in the context of the running page, this bookmarklet will recognize that it is on a YouTube page and look for patterns. Since all web pages are essentially templates where data is put into, the bookmarklet can just look for the template markup and extract the relevant pieces of data from it. This practice is also called screen scraping and I truly believe this to be a new and novel aspect of Twine. Never before had this concept been explored for the masses. Now other recognized pages include pages such as Amazon, where Twine is able to recognize different kinds of products, like books, their prices and such.

This is your bookmarks on steroids!

Anyway, I quickly started creating twines and bookmarking items. Twining can be quite addictive. Once you get past the point of no return you start to, if you’re anything like me (which in all likelihood and fairness, you’re probably not),  mass-twine and systematically organize all your bookmarks and interests.

A great aspect of this is the involvement with other users. This is where people come together over interests. Each user has his own interest feed as it’s called. This is really only just a page on Twine where you see a chronological lising of new items in all the twines you follow. And remember, a Twine is really just a group of items with properties. In the interest feed one can also see what comments have been made to certain items. And one can also create searches for twines, items, members, comments and such. This all helps facilitate engaging with the community around shared interests.

1.3 The Breakdown

At the beginning there was an essential page on Twine. This was the Explore New Twines page. A very nice looking grid of new and often very interesting twines (especially due to the number of KR interested people on the service). There is still pages for top users and top twines though. The Explore New Twines page has since been removed due to spam abuse issues and a failure to control, monitor and manage the influx of new twines being displayed on this page.

So before I continue, I should restate that

- a twine is a group of items
- an item is some arbitrary data of some arbitrary type

Now items can be injected into the system either via the bookmarklets or via manual addition from within Twine. This is fair and square and works well. There is also the third way of injection which I know many users enjoy but which I’ve never really fancied, but it deserves mentioning. This is by posting an e-mail. All twines have a post-to e-mail address that can be used. Since the inception this mechanism has been extended so as to be able to deal with possible spam issues.

Item types range from simple notes, “bookmarks”, videos, books, persons, etc. The set of item types is not open, it is defined by the Twine designers and it has also narrowed down over time. Each item type has an associated template for the bookmarklet, so that if it encounters Amazon it will be able to fill in the book data, for example.

As a side note, Twine is also said to employ natural language parsing to search for keywords and tags on the pages it bookmarks,. This is another very nice feature which has great potential.

I will note that this personal story will not be a complete account for all features of Twine now and then. That is not the point.

During the months of beta testing there were massive problems around performance and stability. A users feedback twine was created to gather user feedback on bugs and feature requests. All in the spirit of twine, the service was eating its own dogfood.

Although privately I felt that the service was not really 100% ready for prime time when it launched, it did anyway and it was still compelling and useful enough for masses to start using.

There were problems though. A pretty big feature was the item properties feature which allowed one to attach new properties to items and fill them out. It may seem like a pretty mundane feature but it is still a quite important one. This feature was stripped completely. It might not have been a big deal had it not been for its symbolic effect. But the service promised it was to return at a later point in full glory. So far this has not happened.

The symbolic value here is that, as a Semantic Web service (now being pedantic with casing), Twine showed a glimpse of a future where users could create their own templates, their own item types and put arbitrary data into twine via the bookmarklet or via APIs. These APIs were promised to arrive at some point but no date was given and that was a wise decision as these have still not arrived. It is still possible to submit data via HTTP POST as the forms on the service does but it is not really a dedicared developer API – or one would be hard pressed to define it as such.

As months passed Twine mutated. And when I say mutated I mean it changed shape, it didn’t just grow in terms of features, it also shrunk. Some features were added, then removed again. New bugs occurred. Others were fixed. One got the feeling that it was really getting nowhere. But still, the development sprints came in succession and little nuggets of usefulness were thrown out to the hungry masses.  And for an malnutritioned user, such nuggets prove quite effective.

There was also some, not to say a lot of, controversy between some users and staff. Who is to blame for what I will not comment on but in any event the situation could have been handled slightly more professionally.

2. The Present

Today the status is that I and others have added months and months worth of high-quality content to Twine – mostly in the form of well-structured and interlinked twines with technical, educational, funny, cultural, etc. bookmarks, documents, video, music, etc.

This has truly been, now speaking just for myself, a monumental undertaking.

The current status of Twine though, is that it is stagnating. Features keep getting removed. Few features are added. If something is broken it remains broken for months and months on end. If something is added, it is likely that it will be removed again later due to some issue or simply the designers wanting to rethink the feature. Such was the fate of ratings.

Maybe if Twine added advertisements on the site it would get the adequate funding to make the necessary investments. It is quite clear by now that the development team is understaffed and inadequate to make the significant progress that is needed to grow.

At this point, sadly, I have finally, and believe me this, I have been stretched beyond anyone’s definition of reasonable, reached the limits of my patience. The elasticity of my patience has been the vision of the future, inspired by the enthusiastic CEO, Nova Spivack. A very passionate and used-to-be engaging user (and owner).

It is not that Twine owes anything to anyone (except perhaps investors) but as user who’s heavily invested in the success of the service, one expects a certain dividend in terms of an equal investment on the other end; after all, if not Twine were to fight for success (or survival as it were), then whom?

Radar Networks, the company that builds Twine appears to have lost its way. Unable to fullfil the dream laid out by its founder. But it is not so hard to dream of the future (your mileage may vary), it is far harder to put those dreams into practice.

3. The Future

Dreams of a giant global graph and the global brain sound nice but ideas have to be exercised and put into practice. It sadens me that Twine no longer appears to be that place.

The options are

- Stay, watch it all fall further apart with morbid fascination
- Leave, look for other, greener pastures

This is a hard choice. The captain does not appear to be in control. The ship is headed straight for an iceberg. Unless a dramatic change happens it is a lost cause. Some would say it has already collided with the iceberg and it’s now only a matter of time. A last ditch desperate effort may be able to salvage the pieces, patch up the ship and sail to a port where it can be redone and brought back on track towards that vision.

The sad thing is that there is really nothing in Twine today that really requires KR technology. It can all easily be built with plain old relational data and yet the scalability problems (in terms of speed) are so great that it appears overwhelming and maybe even impossible to use the features that KR enables in the first place.

I wonder what would have happened if Twine would have started out as a more regular web service with the intent to migrate to a KR backend in time. That might have been the safer strategy. In any event it’s all irrelevant at this point and one of the reasons for joining it in the first place was the KR backend and the possibilities inherent in that choice.

I have looked into building a data migration tool for Twine. So far this looks more or less viable but will, ironically enough, require some screen scraping techniques to complete, simply because the data exposed by Twine is incomplete. One can use the news feeds to get a list of a users twines and from these harvest the Twine and Item data but the item data is incomplete so screen scraping will be required to finish that task. Also, it is necessary to look into the TOS of the service in case one wants to migrate to some other service.

I’d like to migrate my “investment” to some other service. Right now Thumbtack looks promising but it’s really in it’s infancy – although on the UX front they have done a lot of things right (iff still far from a great UX),

I also look to Google to bring this vision closer to reality. In particular because Google is in a unique (well, not quite unique) position to make a scalable solution. In particular one where an open-source community can submit new entity templates to the service. Even if closed, with the resources Google has, I’m sure they could build a lot of templates fast! I really do not understand how this compelling idea has not been more aggressively pursued by Microsoft and Google. Let’s see how Thumbtack fares and if Google comes out with something similar.

The killer feature here would be browser integration. And both Google and Microsoft are in the unique (well, almost unique) position to actually build in support for such services.

I secretly pray that someone will snatch up Twine, if not for the technology, then for the content, some of which is quite good. Of course most of the content can be found on the Web elsewhere, but it has been organized and assembled by human hand. Somebody ought to throw these guys and gals a lifeline.

Time will tell.

4. Addendum (I)

The reader might ask, so what else did you do, besides just posting content on Twine, content which Twine does not benefit from yet, since it hasn’t got advertisements? Well, let me list a few things I did

1. Joined the beta feedback twine and engaged heavily with it
2. Posted countless ideas to my Ideas twine
3. Created a last.fm group for Twine users
4. Created a linkedin group for Twine users
5. Created the Users Empire twine
6. Created the Users Auditorium twine
7. Created the Users Etiquette twine
8. Created Twinia twine, a twine about possible ways to integrate Twine with other servives
9. Joined (by invitation) the private Power Users twine, then exited again due to fights
10. Joined (by invitation) the private The Twine Lounge twine, for core power users, then exited again due to lack of engagement
11. Created videos showcasing problems and possible fixes for Twine

I did get some Twine bumper stickers by mail, so no complaints here.

The twine lounge is, to me, a nursery. It is not about listening to and talking to users. It is about giving a false sense of listening. After all, the team is more or less unable to fulfill the vision and so they are not interested in having the feedback made public and also not in hearing it. This also explains why there is only one nurse – the creator of the twine. No CEO, no developers, only frustrated users.

A bleak assessment – but the truth of the matter.

5. Addendum (II)

Screen scraping is a concept that dates far back. Far earlier than current efforts by Microsoft or Radar Networks. I learned about the technique in the early RDF/XML days, where the community were exploring techniques to translate data into knowledge bases. Now Microsoft Live Labs actually has an ongoing project in this space called Entity Extraction, it is probably not tied to KR but it is about finding data on the Web. Microsoft also has another project called Thumbtack which is remarkably similar to Twine, right down to the visual theming (for shame!) But it does not at this time have the same social aspects and feel.

As for search engines employing domain-specific and targeted screen scraping we really don’t know a whole lot about what they are doing, but we do know they are going to have to become smarter to compete for the worlds advertisement money. Google’s future relies on it and I think it’s fair to say that Microsoft wants to crush Google and so they have to beat them at their own game.

6. References

• [Beta] Users Feedback & Suggestions Twine
• T+ Series 1 (a, b), 2, 3, 4, 5
• Users Auditorium
• Users Etiquette
• Users Empire
• Users Forum
• Twinia
• Twine Ideas
• Last.fm group
• LinkedIn group
• Why Twine interests me
• Nova Spivack on usability

Image via Wikipedia

This is indeed the aim of the European Commission which has just launched a public consultation on web 3.0 “the internet of things” (IoT). The consultation is part of the Commission’s preparations for a communication on IoT which is due to be released in the 3rd quarter of 2009. According to the Commission the communication plans to “propose a policy approach addressing the whole range of political and technological issues related to the move from RFID and sensing technologies to the Internet of Things”.

So what is Web 3.0 and can the European Commission really be at the cutting edge of it? According to Wikipedia, Web 3.0 is “the term used to describe the evolutionary stage that follows Web 2.0″. That as much as probably obvious to most. The term Web 3.0, also known at the “semantic web” was first coined by Tim Berners-Lee who created the internet in 1989 while working at CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research). Nova Spivack a proponent of Web 3.0 who also prefers the term “semantic web” describes Web 3.0 as an attempt to overhaul the internet so that it actually understands the infinite amount of information contained within it and can make links between it. An Internet with a brain perhaps?

The ideas about what Web 3.0 will consist of include:

• ubiquitious connectivity e.g. broadband for mobile devices
• increased interoperability of web services
• “intelligent applications” i.e. the use of artificial intelligence to develop web applications that “almost think like humans”

However, Wikipedia goes on to say that there is as yet no agreement on what the next stage of internet evolution will be….

The European Commission would like Europe to be at the cutting edge of the next evolution of the internet, which is no doubt why it is trying to get into the game early with the recently launched consultation. The policy documents published with the Consultation include a Communication on Future networks and the Internet and a staff working paper on early challenges regarding the Internet of things. It will be interesting to see who responds to this consultation and in particular if it attracts the key protagonists of Web 3.0.

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• What is Web 3.0
• What Comes After Web 2.0?
• Report: A Global Review of the Semantic Web Industry

¿Cómo será la Web 4.0?

por : El equipo de The Inquirer ES

Un reciente estudio de Nova Spivack, uno de los máximos responsables de la empresa Radar Networks, ha ofrecido su visión de lo que será la evolución de Internet. La web semántica tendrá mucho que ver con ese futuro a largo plazo.

En realidad la Web Semántica será la principal seña de identidad de lo que muchos han llamado la Web 3.0, es decir, el siguiente gran paso en la evolución de la telaraña mundial. Mientras que el concepto de la Web 2.0 aún queda difuso para muchos, otros piensan que simplemente está siendo una nueva oportunidad para hacer mucho dinero a través de Internet.

No obstante, un vídeo reciente de un profesor de antropología en la universidad de Kansas ha sido destacado ejemplo de lo que significa este concepto.

El estudio de Nova Spivack sitúa eventos razonables en la evolución de la Web, que estará marcada por la entrada en juego de la web semántica y que tendrá su periodo de vigencia entre el 2010 y el 2020. Más allá Spivack sitúa otro concepto, el de WebOS, que podría marcar el paso a la Web 4.0.

Puede que suene a ciencia ficción, pero el artículo de ZDNet cita a uno de los cibergurús más reconocidos, Raymond Kurzweil, que afirma que en 2029 los ordenadores tendrán la potencia de proceso equivalente a la de un cerebro humano, que se estima en 10^16 cálculos por segundo, y eso dará la opción de contar con un sistema operativo Web – Kurzweil niega la opción de ciencia ficción de una invasión de ‘máquinas inteligentes’ – y de avances increíbles en la nanotecnología. Y tal y como van las cosas, igual tiene razón y todo.

Tetherless World Research Constellation http://tw.rpi.edu/launch/

“The Future of the World Wide Web”

RPI  6/11/08

Live Interactive Debate on the Future of the Web

More of my Notes that Don’t Make Sense

“Washington, Wikipedia, and Web 3.0: What Is the Future of the Web?”

Keynote by Tim Berners-Lee

Putting courses online, as MIT, has done — can’t be used as a research library,”each course is one person’s journey” Tim Berners-Lee about online courses.

Kindergarten teaches values which is not necessarily tied to technology.  By the time the students are in 12^th grade, they are teaching us.  We learn from our students.

Information on the Web (e.g., Wikipedia) is not free—since we pay for connectivity.  

Scale-free (?)

There will always be boundaries and people pushing against them.

Text-based protocols the system will carry everything you can read or write.  In some ways there are no limits.  Cover your body in little sequins where each one is a little Web cam, and every pixel in a room corresponds to a little sequin on your body…..  Ha ha

Semantic web scaling of ontologies—who is going to write them all?  A few are public and used by a large number of people and are cheap to make.  Design a system with scale-free web of ontologies, then it all works.

Design semantic web as system of connected communities, it will work because it is designed for a scale-free system in a scale-free world. 

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Read/Write/Web Future of the Web http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/future_of_the_web_debate3.php

Panelists: Wendy Hall, Nigel Shadbolt, Nova Spivack, Deborah McGuinness (Moderator), James Hendler (Moderator)

Nova Spivack

What is the incentive for people to include semantics in the structure of their Web site?  Is the semantic Web a dream? 

Yes!  As the amount of information explodes, the problem gets exponentially harder to solve.  Burden of thinking on programmers to anticipate problems.  Semantic Web approach puts the burden on the data itself, instead of making smarter software.  Creates a knowledge commons, where anyone can add data about data. Create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.  Technical and social challenges – getting people to agree on vocabulary to describe a domain of knowledge; storing and querying data in scalable fashion.  But, is there an alternative? Can you imagine a future without the notion of the semantic Web?  Information is increasing vastly faster than our information processing capacity.  We could use large numbers of people to make sense of the information, but that approach is not scalable.  So you need some way of making sense of this data that doesn’t rely on AI or on human intelligence.  So we need to embody the information necessary to understand the data in the data itself.

Nigel Shadbolt

How does AI fit into the future of the Web?

Most people think it’s a failed project.  In fact, the Web took a long time to come to the attention of people working in AI. Along the way, we have discovered algorithms that can do many, many things–the inventory of successes in AI are great.  I think what we’re going to see is the use of ideas and concepts of AI in a much reduced form operating in ways we never imagined.  These working at global scale have very interesting properties.  What I see emerging is this large, collective social fabric of the web of people, a developing ecology of task-achieving programs. We have these systems starting to appear now.  Still essentially people-driven, a very different kind of AI.  Reverse the letters, IA – Intelligence augmentation.

Wendy Hall

What about the multi-lingual Internet? Will this create a multicultural mosaic or a Tower of Babel?

There’s a whole huge Chinese Web that we (the English speaking public) never see.  220 million Internet users in China, about to overtake the number of Internet users we have in U.S., but that’s only 16% of the population.  But they use mobile phones to access the Web.  That will make Chinese the dominant language on the Web.  Of course, some English language sites on the Web can’t be seen by the Chinese, because their government has barred these sites.  The regulatory layer determines very much what happens.  Educating governments all over the world as to what they’re dealing with when they bring legislation into this area because our contention is that most people don’t understand what the Web is and how it’s regulated and what they do.  Not just language but social context, in other words.  YouTube is a huge hub in the Web, so when Pakistan tried to take out YouTube, they didn’t realize the tremendous interconnectedness of what they’re dealing with.  Communication to break down barriers.  We’re already living in a fragmented Web, and dealing with that is not just about teaching everybody English which is what we did in the old empire days.

See more questions and discussion at http://tw.rpi.edu/twc/

I bumped into this webcast from others referencing it as a ‘must watch’ from NextWeb 2008. So, while I had sworn off pondering semantics for awhile (too early for most clients) I decided I should check it out. I wasn’t disappointed. Nova Spivack (CEO of Twine) gave the best 101 on Semantic I have seen: Five approaches to add/infer semantic data How semantic enables JIT database models How semantic enables part of the “Web as an OS” dream Where we are now, where we are going Q&A and moreAs usual, the keys I saw are below plus my usual raw scribble I took while running/watching this.

Details Notable Points Title/Link: NextWeb Presentation Slides (Excellent clarity & flow) Duration: ~45m Presenter: Nova Spivack AI focus (I knew I liked him for a reason), Co-Founded Earthweb which created DICE.com Recommend to Watch? Yes Put aside that he and I both agree this is early adopter material … you need to watch this to begin to get your head around it. If what he is saying shakes out … the tooling to enable semantic frameworks around data is 2-3 years away from prime time. That is just a blink (especially if you have kids). 1. Queue the “Circle Of Life” Song … Web 3.0 Returns Us To The Backend via Semantic Tools He made some excellent points on the cyclical nature of development focus and how Web 2.0 is all about the UI. The next wave, however, will refocus us on the backend and the catalyst for that will be the value semantic structures can bring to businesses (he has some great slides on that). Primarily he pointed to how documents and data exploding on the web making algorithmic search models like Google begin to be inefficient. 2.Not AI … AS (as in Artificial Stupidity) Perhaps a joke only a AI major would appreciate. His point was that AI can’t solve complex riddles like deriving semantic data for existing stuff. It can help but it is more of tool for the human mind to apply … than a machine you can delegate this task to. 3. Smart Data … Dumb Software Another good word play. Here he was talking about how enriching data with semantics can enable the applications that consume it to become dumber about the specifics of data (relationships between it, what it means). Instead all of the application focus can be on how to dynamic leverage data that is presented to it based on its associated semantics. I think his venture Twine is something along that front.

I’m am going to ask to get an invitation to the beta of Twine. From that I hope to get a better sense of what he is seeing here.

Would be curious on your thoughts … as always.

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• 6/6/2008, 6:11 AM
• Radar Networks – CEO – Nova Spivack
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Product called Twine
• Excellent article hitting topics -
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/25/is-keyword-search-about-to-hit-its-breaking-point/
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ http://thenextweb.org/2008/04/03/nova-spivack-the-semantic-web-as-an-open-and-less-evil-web/
• 6/6/2008, 6:12 AM
• Overview
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Stuff = Nouns
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Connections = Verbs
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Social Graph is subset of Semantic Graph
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Improves collab, integration of data, personalization, etc
• 6/6/2008, 6:15 AM
• Web 3.0
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Coming 3rd Decade of Web (till in 2.0)
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Focus enrich structure of web
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ File Server to Database
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Bauer Comment – nice slide showing evolution by web ‘waves’ (1, 2, 3, etc)
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Pendulum from front end focus to a back end focus
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ 3.0 backend … 4.0 back to front end based on improved backend
• 6/6/2008, 6:18 AM
• Failure of search as data on web increases
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Bauer Comment – another referenced graph that is solid (on his blog)
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Solutions
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,1. Tagging
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,2. Natural language search
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,3. Semantic (goes into understanding meaning of natural search)
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,a. Keyword search is capped out
• 6/6/2008, 6:19 AM
• Five approaches to add / infer from data
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,1. Tagging
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,1) Bad due to inconsistency between public taggers
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,a) Bauer Comment – he talk about how large data set can analyze the tags and reach a common definition of tags from the crowd (UX card sorting in mass)
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,2. Statistical Approach
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,1) Google
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,3. Linguistic Approach
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,1) Understand meaning of text … rules, grammar, etc … read the text systemically
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,2) Great but high CPU, hard to scale, language dependancies
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,4. Semantic web
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,1) Set of standards (open) make the semantic web (W3)
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,2) Semantic technologies
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,a) Express, infer meaning of things
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,3) Meta Data … put into the data that describes meaning of data
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,4) Does w/ open standards
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,5) Problems — Hard to scale, who makes all this meta-data on existing content
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,5. Artificial Intelligence
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,1) Decades away … Cycorp in US … 15 years manually keying human knowledge
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,2) Wikipedia – AI on top might do better keeping up w/ human consensus
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,3) Huge in 4.0 …. But far away
• 6/6/2008, 6:24 AM
• How to compare add/infer data
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Software smarter
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Data smarter
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ AI is both
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Semantic web is in the middle
• 6/6/2008, 6:26 AM
• Two paths
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Manual – RDF, L … too hard
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Top down – Automatically generating … from content .. More practical
• Twine
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Use RDF … top down
• Make a higher resolution web as each piece of data carries more information about it
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Types (person, city)
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Relationship (like ‘lives in’)
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Google is just pages / links
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Bauer Comment – Key becomes normalizing, in effect, static content via verbs and nouns descriptions
• Bauer Comment – Between websites imply global nouns
• Smart data
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Enables dumb software …. To become smart via the enriched data
• Applications evolve that read semantic data and are independent of vertical (health, etc)
• He wants to not use AI … use AS (Artificial Stupidity)
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Bauer Comment – good word play … helps clarify role of machine in complex decision chain
• 6/6/2008, 6:31 AM
• JIT in time data
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Semantic web pulls in just when needed
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Problem in past way communicating schema (i.e. XML, DDL)
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Semantic web … does it via an entology … a page on web … makes sense of data
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Bauer Comment – sounds like XML to me
• 6/6/2008, 6:33 AM
• Making the web an OS
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ File system aspect could be based on semantic
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Bauer Comment – How does MESH play into this … or similar
• Open – Ontologies, Rules, Data Records, Data Mappings, Query Interface,
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Bauer Comment – Key break down of basic semantic framework
• Standards
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ OWL – Built on RDF … more expressive schemas
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ SWIRL – Rules Language
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Griddle – Transform data
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Sparkle – Another RDF solution
• 6/6/2008, 6:36 AM
• Basic Unit of Data in Semantic Web
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Triple – Subject , Predicate, Object (susan, works for, IBM)
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ URI – Points to location on web with further information on each piece (for the triple) …
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Bauer Comment – Linking database definitions or file definitions cross site
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Then link data records – create open database
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Better term “Data Web”
• 6/6/2008, 6:39 AM
• Table isn’t how we think
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ List of triples … but lists get really REALLY long … talking billions
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Vomits a DB to stick triples in DB
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Solve this via ‘Triple Store” … new DB designed for this
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Easier to maintain
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ List A + List B = List C
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,□ Bauer Comment – Hello VSAM
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Form and Dissolve database relationship structure
• 6/6/2008, 6:41 AM
• Linked data universe
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Number of ontologies cover various Ontologies
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Reviews, Music, Communities, etc
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Bauer Comment – Open XML standards are similar
• 6/6/2008, 6:42 AM
• Right now
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Early adoption period
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ A lot of momentum in developers … early applications like Twine
• Focus today is how to become more open
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Data portability project
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Semantic web enables portability
• Very hard … no tools
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Two examples
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ FOOF – Friend of Friend
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Shock – Sharing forums
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ API’s get more open in next year
• Twine
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ TO get into beta — nova@radarnetworks.com nextweb2008 twine
• Q&A
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ 6/6/2008, 6:47 AM
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Economic consequences of this? New business models? Theme.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Semantic web doesn’t create new business models. Just makes existing ones better.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Bauer Comment – Better can be disruption for existing players that don’t change
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Example of new player – Singechay (sp?) … semantic commerce, ads, etc
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Open standards … enable?
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Semantic web … can you use it to lock in users?
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Technically if you use the open standards … it is easier (in his view)
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Focus more on value creation … not lock in
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Trick to lock in … make your own Ontology … stuck in your system
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Reason web succeeded was simple … Semantic web isn’t
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Key question is how long did WWW take to get defined … 15 years
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ We typically think of explosion point in early 90’s
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Get to point of ‘easier’ to use
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Gap is tools for Semantic web … estimate 1st wave 12-18 months … twine is open up hosted development tools
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Semantic requires definitions of objects and relationships… how get agreement
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Bauer Comment – Whispering in background about ‘free beers at door’ … hehe
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Semantic web designed for disagreement
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Good but many definitions
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Bauer Comment – Similar to MLS in real estate market
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Built into standard you can map across Onotologies
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Anyone can make associations … community driven …
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Bauer Comment – so the walls come down via crowd
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,○ Amazed on how quickly google tagged images online
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Twine is doing same .
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Social network for sharing knowledge … discover around interest
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Add information auto tags
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Learn and make recommendations
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Open more in summer / fall
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,§ Tries to automate RDF setup
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On June 11, leading authorities on the World Wide Web will gather at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for an old-fashioned debate with a social media twist. The questions for discussion will be shaped and selected by the collective wisdom of Web users from around the world.

After delivering a keynote address, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, will join a panel of experts from academia and industry for a public discussion about the Web’s future. The content of the debate will be collaboratively created by Web users, who can submit questions and promote them through a user-based ranking system, similar to the community-based news site Digg. The most popular questions will drive the discussion at the June 11 debate.

The public debate, which will be streamed live via an interactive Webcast, is part of a daylong event to celebrate the launch of the Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer – a new academic center devoted to the emerging field of Web Science.
A wide range of issues are up for discussion, from sustaining the usefulness of the current Web to creating a next-generation Semantic Web, as well as the role of politics, education, and sociological factors in the Web’s continued evolution. Following introductory remarks by Rensselaer President Shirley Ann Jackson, participants in the panel will be:

• Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium.
• Wendy Hall, vice president of the Association for Computing Machinery and senior vice president of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
• Nigel Shadbolt, former president of the British Computer Society and chief technology officer of Garlik.
• Nova Spivack, high-tech entrepreneur and founder of Radar Networks.
• Deborah McGuinness, Web language expert and Rensselaer Constellation Professor of the Tetherless World Constellation.
• James Hendler, one of the inventors of the Semantic Web and Rensselaer Constellation Professor of the Tetherless World Constellation (moderator).

Members of the public are invited to submit and vote on questions until the day of the debate. During the discussion, viewers will be able to interact with the panelists by submitting follow-up questions and comments in real time. For details about this innovative event and how you can participate in the discussion, go to: http://tw.rpi.edu/launch.

Since its inception, the Web has changed the ways people work, play, communicate, collaborate, and educate, according to James Hendler, Constellation Professor of the Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer. There is, however, a growing realization among researchers across a number of disciplines that without new research aimed at understanding the current, evolving, and potential Web, opportunities for new and revolutionary capabilities may be missed or delayed.

“If we want to be able to model the Web, if we want to understand the architectural principles that have provided for its growth, and if we want to be sure that it supports the basic social values of trustworthiness, personal control over information, and respect for social boundaries, then we must pursue a research agenda that targets the Web and its use as a primary focus of attention,” Hendler said.

The Tetherless World Constellation will address this emerging area of Web Science, focusing on the Web and its 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. They 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,” Hendler said. For more information about the Tetherless World Constellation, go to: http://tw.rpi.edu.