Or so says Mathew Ingram. And I tend to agree with him. In fact, many of the people who I’ve been presenting to and speaking with on my West Coast trip tend to agree as well.
The exciting thing is going to be what’s possible with this new plumbing. The ‘magic’, as Mathew refers to it. While there is value in the Semantic Web community discussing - passionately - data standards and other aspects of the plumbing there’s equal, or greater, value in discussing the magic. And frankly I don’t think that happens enough.
It’s the day dreaming of grand visions that will help create the next exciting thing. This has been the focus of the BlueBlog with certain posts but even we don’t openly discuss this enough with all of you. Especially considering the rich conversation that ensues whenever we broach the subject.
We’re excited about bringing you the benefits of contextual browsing. Whether it be object recognition in pages, text, and links and the presentation of personalized shortcuts or the layering on of popularity context, we think that contextual browsing - in its current state and future potential - is an exciting future. We’re also glad that you do so too.
Contextual browsing. As Erick from TechCrunch eloquently wrote: “You never have to go to a search engine, you just have to surf the Web and hop from concept to concept.” I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on the concept of contextual browsing and where you want it to take you next?
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Good one Fraser!
All I can say is that understanding is the journey. You know how everyday our vision become more clear and crisper. Quite frankly 2 years ago AdaptiveBlue was more a dream than a vision.
Today, we know that Semantic Web is not the end but means to a new kind of browsing experience. We know that knowing semantics does not help you improve the brute force search, but rather semantics helps shortcut the search by leveraging context. These and many other insights that we have today were arrived at through the exploration and hands on experience. Other folks have not had the benefit of try to build a tangible consumer product around semantic web and thats why they view the issue from a different angle.
As always, the proof is in the pudding. To fulfill the promise of semantics we need to build kick ass, fun, useful and intelligent apps.
I think one of the problems is the adoption rate, and the reason why it is slow is because of the “data lock in” that Tim B.L. describes. It’s easy to create data in/out web apps, and now getting eaiser to create relationships internally with that data.
But, the difficult thing is that the semantic web requires one to look at things in a different way like you both described here AND have access to the data. Current web 2.0 API’s wont cut it since relationships will need to be made on the dataset as a whole vs. single result sets. The context of semantics being closely related to Data Mining is probably what makes it boring to most.
I’ve been looking at a couple of very large forums the last few days, you know, web 1.0 social communications. These forums are still growing, and, one it particular I estimated to have about 10,000,000 posts over the last 4 years with about 6GB of just text. There is a ton of meta data in each post as well. Thinking up ways to extrapolate semantics from that data into a mashup is a blast, writing a bot to get the data in an effective way is a pain that most probably wont do.
Spot on with both posts about the need to dream and have a vision.
Without the dreaming that occurs at AdaptiveBlue day after day we wouldn’t be where we are.
Without dreaming about the various semantic mashups that could be created from data in forums there wouldn’t be a bot to write.
There’s a really rich community discussing the plumbing that can enable the ‘magic’ but where’s the conversation about what can be done? It should be happening in lock-step.
We need to butter up that dry toast with something.
“The conversation about what can be done.” This is the key.
Once a week AdaptiveBlue Daydream posts that take into account any and all possibilities would be cool.
Talking about the “what ifs”, and the “wouldn’t it be cools” might get some fun conversation going on.