Tim Berners-Lee has written this interesting blog post about the Social Graph. Having just completed my master’s thesis in this topic, pointing out some of the same ideas and opinions, I am looking towards the future with great anticipation.
“So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That’s just what the graph does for us. We have the technology — it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL.”
This is one of the main conclusions of the thesis. Another point of the thesis is that users will loose control as a side effect of the Social Semantic Web, as Tim also points out:
“The less inviting side of sharing is losing some control. Indeed, at each layer — Net, Web, or Graph — we have ceded some control for greater benefits.”
I do however tend to disagree in his argument that “It is about getting excited about connections, rather than nervous”. That is the pros of “Social Semantic Software” outweigh the cons of loss of privacy. Just recently thousands of Facebook users have protestedagainst the Facebook Beacon service as they felt their privacy invaded. Opposite of Tim I do not believe this to be merely a temporary phenomenon. At all the abstraction levels, the Net, the Web and the Graph, we have protected our private and personal information using firewalls and access restrictions. In the “Giant Global Graph”such protection is not possible.
Does that mean that Semantic Web Technology does not provide any value to users of Social Software? No, it can provide great value, but I believe that it is vital that we have a discussion about how to ensure the privacy of the users. This discussion is bound to end up with a compromise between the “Giant Global Graph” and privacy.
Furthermore there are reasons why one would not want a Giant Global Graph. One is multiple identities; e.g. I would like to keep my professional LinkedIn Graph separate from my personal Facebook Graph. That would not be possible to do in a Giant Social Graph.
As I started out, I am looking forward to seeing Semantic Social Software, but it is not as picture perfect as Tim would like it to be….
Filed under: Social Software, The Semantic Web | Leave a Comment
Tags: social software Tim Berners-Lee giant global graph
Good news everyone!
Bender’s big score schedueled to be released 27th November is right around the corner. Check out this new trailer!
Filed under: Private Stuff | Leave a Comment
Tags: bender's big score, futurama
Social software is about users and the content they create. This changes the role of the user since the user is now also the creator and not only the receiver. This again changes the sense of ownership since the intellectual property then belongs to the users (a.k.a. creators). An obvious result of this is that they feel co-ownership of the sites – and demand control and participation in the decision making. However there is a mismatch between the current state of social software services and the changed user role. Users do not control their data, have little influence on decision making, users can not carry their profile to a new provider if they wish to and it is not posible to socialize across services.
This thesis examins and implements interoperable, decentralized social software from a cross domain perspective in order to overcome the above paradox. A solution is presented using a peer-to-peer architechture and semantic web technologies such as RDF and SPARQL. The thesis concludes that semantic web technology can be a falicitator for enhanced interoperability whereas decentralization of social software introduces issued in terms of e.g. supporting sociality.
Filed under: Social Software, The Semantic Web | 1 Comment
Clay Shirky brings up an interesting point in his post about describing relationships with a controlled vocabulary. Clay argues that a formal and explicit ontology for human relations is unworkable from a philosophical aspect – that is relationships between people cannot be neatly boxed into predefined categories. I tend to agree…
However, defining such relationships is exactly what social software services does - such as LinkedIn that e.g. define the relationships ManagedDirectlyBy and WorkedInGroupWith. When that is the case and we want to express the relationships in RDF we will need an ontology which is exactly what RELATIONSHIP does.
It is safe to assume that services will require different ontologies as each service has different requirements. As Clay points out a single ontology defining any type of relationship is just not possible, but using RDF this is easy as one can use whatever ontology that may match the requirements.
For this to be useful and allow systems to interoperate we must link between ontologies. Doing so may be successful in areas such as biology, medicine and genomics where concepts are unambiguous, but how do we link between abstract relationships? Can WorkedInGroupWith be linked to ColleagueOf or the WorksWith property of RELATIONSHIP? Not likely – In fact the only safe link may be to the property KnowsOf in which case most meaning will be lost.
In my opinion there is no solution to this problem and it really illustrates the weakness of semantic web technology – It assumes a simpler world but the fact is that relationships are not simple. In fact relationships mean different things to different persons and cultures – that is there is no shared worldview. Take the property ColleagueOf. Due to the Power Distance of the Danish culture Danes may think of their manager as a colleague while in China this is unheard of.
Good luck making that work…
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Agile Living
I have for some time been interested in Agile development methods and has as Jimmy found that there are some interesting parallels to how we live our lives. More interesting may be what we can learn and what tools we can use from Agile development in our everyday life. Here are a few points that I feel are helpful in my life:
- Carpe diem: Don’t waste your time looking into the future – you won’t be able to foresee it anyway. Life is an evalutionary process and the plan you make today will be worthless tomorrow. Also maybe more important, Don’t worry. Instead you should deal with problems as they occur.
- Keep it simple: Don’t make your life more complex than it has to be. Choose the simplest solution that supports your needs and enjoy the flexibility this will bring when your priorities change. They will change! I’m not saying you shouldn’t get married and have children, but maybe you should try living together for a while first.
- Encourage change: Your priorities will change and life will present new paths. Don’t be afraid to take advantage of the opportunities that arise and don’t look at changes as negative but instead as opportunities to improve your life. Keeping your life simple will help you to be able to do that and to adjust to the changes.
- Do it: If you are wondering how something will effect your life then go ahead and do it. It may not be what you imagined but at least you won’t regret that you didn’t do it. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. Each mistake made is not a loss but a lesson learned which will help you make more informed decisions in the future. Again, keeping your life simple allows you to do stuff!
A good example is some friends of mine who, after living in a city for several years, moved to a new city which they had no prior relation to as they wanted to try something different. After a short period of time it was clear that they did not like living there so they quit their jobs and terminated the lease on the apartment and moved to yet another city. After a while they decided to buy a house in the city they originally lived in. The point of the example is that they were willing to change their lives and actually doing it and at the same time they kept it simple e.g. by renting apartments which again made them able to adjust to the changes. It may seem like a waste to move 3 times within a short period of time only to end up where they started, but in fact the lessons they learned from the experience helped them realize what was the right choice for them and in the end changed their priorities.
“Life happens when you’re busy making other plans” – John Lennon
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… Bender Is Great …
That’s it!. I’ve watched the final episode of Futurama – the amazing adventures of the delivery boy Fry, Bender the foul-mouthed, alcoholic, cigar-smoking, kleptomaniacal, human hating, egocentric, ill-tempered robot and one-eyed captain Leela in the year 3000. How am I going to waste my time now?
My favourite part must be when Bender walks down the sidewalk sharing his singing talent in the episode “Bendin’ In The Wind” of the 3rd season:
Froggie went a-courtin’ and he did ride, uh-huh, uh-huh.
Well, Froggie went a-courtin’ and he did ride,
blah’blah’blah something Bender is great,
Froggie went a-courtin’ and Bender is great, uh-huh.
That’s good stuff! I guess all I’m left with now is The Simpsons! Can’t wait to see the new episodes scheduled in 2008!
Filed under: Private Stuff | 2 Comments
Social Semantic Mark-up
Everyone seams to agree that semantic markup of data on the World Wide Web, which allows computers to extract the meaning of the data, is an excellent idea. This is however where the agreement comes to an end. A number of different formats are available today, that all tries to add semantic meaning to otherwise meaningless data. Markup of data may be an important step in enhancing interoperability between social web services as data can then be extracted, queried and combined into new and better services, but which format do we choose?
Resource Definition Framework (RDF): In 1999 Tim Berners-Lee and the rest of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the specifications for RDF along with a vision of making the Internet reach its potential. The challenge RDF tries to achieve, is to provide a language which can express both data and rules for reasoning about data, which is understood by the computer, while at the same time supporting the versatility of the Internet. RDF does this by expressing semantics as sets of triples represented in XML where each part represents subject, verb and object.The strength of RDF is that it is freely extensible. That is, any data can be marked up using RDF as it is possible to create new ontologies as well as mix ontologies within a document. Another not insignificant reason for using RDF is that it is W3C supported, however RDF has not become the success W3C expected. There are several reasons for this, the most significant being that there is little immediate benefit to end users by marking up data with RDF. Naturally in the context of the Semantic Web Vision there are huge benefits, but this vision is far from being reality, difficult to comprehend and questionable if it in fact will become reality at all. In other words RDF is an all-or-nothing attempt to solve an idealistic vision. Other reasons for the lack of deployment includes that the syntax of RDF is not user friendly, it is complex to understand and implement and data must be repeated in both HTML and RDF documents.
Microformats: The approach taken by Microformats is the complete opposite of RDF which in many ways succeeds where RDF fails. Microformats is not intended to address the Semantic Web Vision but instead offers small domain specific solutions to marking up frequent data on web pages. The syntax is simple, easy to understand and integrated and compliant with HTML. Most importantly it offers immediate value to the users through tools and browser plug-ins. Therefore Microformats has the widest deployment so far.The reason for the success of Microformats is also its most important limitation. It only offers solutions to small specific problems and adding new formats to new problems is discouraged. In other words the expressiveness of Microformats is very limited and most Microformats also describe entities that have a finite set of data entries such as a calendar entry, address information or a resume. Another problem is that there is no standards body supporting Microformats although it is the intention of the authors that there should be.
Embeded RDF (eRDF):Â eRDF is an attempt to support the extensibility of RDF while following the principles of Microformats, thereby overcoming many limitations of both RDF and Microformats. The basic approach is to embed RDF in XHTML in a user friendly manner, however eRDF only covers a subset of RDF, does not allow datatypes and is not supported by W3C. Instead W3C is working on RDFa using a very similar approach which indicates that the days of eRDF are limited.
RDFa: Although eRDF and RDFa are very similar, RDFa has some advantages. Most important RDF is fully supported and it is created by W3C although it is not yet a standard. Unlike eRDF, RDFa is not XHTML 1.0 compliant but will be supported by XHTML 2.0. Although XHTML 1.0 states that unrecognized tags are ignored, some developers may choose alternatives to RDFa until XHTML 2.0 becomes usable which will take some time. Although RDFa is following many of the principles that has made Microformats successful it does not change the fact that it is designed with the Semantic Web Vision in mind, and due to that it is subject to some of the same characteristics that has caused the lack of success of RDF.
Social Semantic Markup: If we are to mark up social web services it is important to recognize the diversity of the different services. It is clear that the limited selection of Microformats will severely limit the data it is possible to markup. Even if developed a new Microformat specification addressing data in e.g. photo sharing services it would be extremely difficult to develop a format which would cover the requirements of any photo sharing service on the Internet. That is due to the fact that there is no finite set of data or relations between identities.Having ruled out Microformats as a suitable format for marking up social web services the choice is between RDF and RDFa. Both solutions provide the same basic functionality, but as mentioned RDFa has advantages compared to RDF.
Filed under: Social Software | Leave a Comment
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