Chris Brooks and Scott Bateman from U of S

• What is the web? - embodient of human knowledge - TBL
• The idea of linking
• "Digital Natives" don't know what it's like to be unplugged - Roland - I hate the term "digital natives" but I have to admit it does have relevance and meaning
• Mid 90s beginning of new web, resurgence of AI after the "AI winter of the 80s"
• AI driven by total connectivity and mobility and large sets of data and real time
• Data Mining was the result of this
• Out of this was born :-) the semantic web - XML, RDF, etc
• Describing the uppercase Semantic Web
• The revival of agents - to personalize the web for YOU
• Clippy was an early non web attempt from Microsoft (researcher blamed development team for not implementing "half" of it)
• Ontology - write things down in a standard way after we agree what we are talking about
• The hard part is doing "deep" things
• Semantic Web problems - technology is too hard for 'humans' (not compatible with 'view source' mentality of the web), tried to solve too generic problems
• Where are we ? Lots of techy tools that only techies can use (so works in scientific orgs like NASA and e-learning), Smart Agent promise not realized
• Moving on to Web 2.0 ....
• Parallel movement
• Purpose based rather than generic apps for social media and networking
• Facilitated by new tech like AJAX and consumer contributions (Wiki, Blogs, tagging)
• Took 10 years for the core ideas behind blogs (web page creation for everybody) and wikis (editing somebody else's website)
• YOU are the point of Web 2.0
• The Long Tail - people out there just like you no matter how microniche you are in
• Business has picked it up
• Web 2.0 is the greatest online word of mouth network
• Show "Teaching the machine" video from Kansas
• Web 2.0 has limitations....
• Noisy tags mean noisy knowledge
• Are we reaching a limit already?
• Does the machine learn from this?
• Thesis of Scott and Chris: convergence needs to happen
• Bring the high tech tools to cope with the Web 2.0 explosion of Content
• Few to Many and than Many to Everybody (Web 1.0) and then Web 2.0 Everybody to Everybody
• TBL's Semantic Web vision and Web 2.0 ARE compatible
• FOAF == machine readable social networking
• Ontologies 'r Us ! - Roland - Yes
• e.g. data mining of delicious - Peter Mika
• The Dark Side of the Semantic Web - James Hendler - A little bit of semantics i.e. structure will go a long way
• Mass Personalization is coming - Aries Lab is their project