S is for Semantics

Data Independence at ISWC

Back on August 1, Ralph Hodgson declared Data Independence Day , to celebrate the opening of oegov, a website that collects and organizes ontologies and data sets about government. Along with recent developments in open data in the US government, this creates a an opportunity to mash-up government data in a way that has not been possible before.  

We're celebrating next week at ISWC with a tutorial on building semantic web applications for government. The tutorial will show attendees how to use semantic web standards to create their own data mashup applications.  A lot of the features of the semantic web come in to play - distributed vocabularies (using SKOS, of course), linked open data, RSS, etc.  The idea is that each attendee will walk away from the workshop with their own app that they created from data now available from the goverment.

Controlled vocabularies play a big role in this - bigger than you might have thought possible.  After all, if two people use a common controlled vocabulary well, they can share data.  But if they use it badly, well, then data quality issues dominate.  Fortunately, there are some controlled vocabularies being used in the government in a pretty consistent way.  They are published in convenient forms on OEGov, where they can be used as terminology hubs for mashing up information. 

The workshop is part of the International Semantic Web Conference 2009, to be held near Washington, DC from 25-29 October (the workshop itself will be held on Oct 26 in the afternoon, and you can register without attending the whole conference!).  The conference this year has a special focus on government data and applications, and should be a great event for anyone interested in openness of government data.

Semantic Social Networking

FOAF was one of the first Semantic Web projects, and is still trotted out as an example on a regular basis.  The FOAF model itself has been criticized a number of times (I don't feel like googling all the examples), but there are some things about FOAF that are very interesting in today's world.

One could criticize FOAF for having invented social networking in the late nineties, then having missed the whole Web 2.0 boat, to have the limelight taken by myspace, linkedin, livejournal, and nowadays by facebook.  Indeed in terms of bringing social networking awareness to the masses, this criticism would be true.  But if you have a look at some of the founding assumptions behind FOAF, you'll find that the project was eerily prescient - forseeing problems with social networking that took years to come to light once social networks became commonplace.

A simple example is a bit of drama that happened on the social networking site LiveJournal a couple of years ago.  Livejournal was sold to a Russian firm, with the risk that all the servers, with all those back journals, would migrate outside the United States.  Many American users (who for the most part had been ignoing the vast number of Russian speaking users) suddenly became aware of the fact that their precious journal data might drop out of control of copywrite laws that they understood.  A panic ensued, and LiveJournal dump programs became quite the "meme".

A more recent example was the change of the terms of use for Facebook.  Suddenly, Facebook reserved the right to use your photos in its advertising.  Okay, they probably don't want that photo of the time you passed out in Vegas and your 'friends' stripped you to your underwear and drew faces on your chest with shaving cream, but you never know.  The outcry amongst FB users cause them to rescind this policy.  But the same issue came up again - who owns the data that you put on social networking servers?

FOAF understood this issue over a decade ago, when they envisioned a distributed social network, where servers owned/operated by different agents could participate in the same social network.  A sort of decentralized, distributed version of facebook.  Where you kept your own ownership, access control, backups, etc.  Or you could hire someone to do it for you, if you preferred.  But you had the option.

This is a key idea behind the Social Web - not just social networking on the web, but making the network part of the web itself.  How can this work?  The Semantic Web plays a big role in the solution - or so many of us believe.  Come to the Social Web Camp in Santa Clara on November 2 and  find out what the W3C and others are doing to make this come true.