Scott Bateman

Saskatchewan Interactive 2007 - Convergence or Divergence in Tomorrow's Web

Roland Tanglao - March 8, 2007 - 3:54pm

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.
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