Introduction
What happens when you have lots of web, lots of semantics, and lots of social interaction with it?
Web 3.0!
What is the Semantic Wave 2008 Report?
The first comprehensive assessment of Web 3.0 semantic technologies and market opportunities.
A guide to the next stage of internet evolution that will spawn billion dollar technology markets.
An essential industry roadmap to profiting from Web 3.0.
Who is Mills Davis?
Industry visionary, researcher, analyst, and consultant.
Semantic Wave
“When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.”
— William S. Burroughs
What is the evolution of the internet to 2020?
What is the semantic wave?
A tidal wave of four internet growth stages.
What is Web 1.0?
The world-wide web.
What is Web 2.0?
A web of participation.
What is social computing?
Putting the “I” in the UI, and the “we” in web.
What is Web 3.0?
A web of meanings and connected knowledge.
What makes up Web 3.0?
Web 3.0 = Web 2.0 + semantic web + AI.
What is different about Web 3.0?
Knowledge-centric patterns of computing.
What is Web 4.0?
A web of connected intelligence.
What are we looking for in Web 4.0?
Everything communicating, everywhere, all the time, sleepless.
Semantic Technologies
“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”
— Mark Weiser
What do we cover in the semantic technology section?
Semantic technology trends in user interface, social computing, applications, and infrastructure.
Perspectives, Definitions & Business Value
Megatrends shaping the semantic wave:
What are long waves of innovation?
Major conceptual advances that power economic growth seem to occur about 2-3 times a century.
What is the approaching singularity?
Nature doubles down when a bet is working!
What is the integral perspective?
It’s key to successful development in the semantic wave.
What are integral perspectives for semantic technology?
Knowledge, user experience, social computing, applications, infrastructure, and development.
Semantics and semantic technology definitions:
What are semantics?
Semantics are the meanings of things.
What were semantic technologies circa 1700 BCE?
Ceramic disks with a spiral organization like modern CDs. About 1 KB each. Nobody can read them.
What are semantic technologies today?
Digital tools that represent meanings, theories, and know-how separately from documents, data and program code.
What are the functions of semantic technologies?
Create, discover, represent, and reason with knowledge to accomplish business, personal, and societal purposes.
How do semantic and information technologies differ?
In the way they represent knowledge and meanings and how they reason with them.
How do semantic and information technologies differ?
One understands concepts, the other artifacts.
How do semantic and information technologies differ?
Adaptive, autonomic & autonomous vs. manual action.
Business value of semantic technologies:
What dimensions of business value do semantic technologies impact?
Capability, performance, and life cycle value.
How do semantic technologies tap new value?
By modeling knowledge, adding intelligence, and enabling learning.
Do semantic technologies impact intellectual property?
Yes. They enable new categories of knowledge assets.
How do semantic technologies improve performance?
By improving efficiency and effectiveness, and delivering a strategic edge.
How much can semantic tech improve performance?
2-10X improvements in measures of performance today. Potential for 100-1000X increases.
How may semantic technologies impact labor?
Transform labor economics by changing productivity, cost of education, personnel acquisition, and labor rates.
How do semantic technologies maximize life cycle value?
They improve economics and reduce risks across all stages of the solution life cycle.
How do semantic technologies impact R&D stage?
Rapid, iterative development speeds time to solution and reduces risk.
How does semtech impact deployment and operations?
Rapid, flexible deployment, lower cost of operation, ease of maintenance, robust security.
How does semtech impact maintenance & evolution?
Semantic models minimize impact of changes to functions, processes, and information sources.
Knowledge & Reasoning
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
— T.S. Eliot
What’s covered in the section on knowledge & reasoning?
Knowledge, knowledge representation, and reasoning.
Drivers:
What is the spectrum of knowledge and reasoning?
More expressive knowledge, more powerful reasoning.
What is the value-to-cost trade-off for executable knowledge?
More power and value correlates with increasing cost.
What are the drivers for executable knowledge &
semantically-enabled information?
Definition of knowledge:
What is knowledge?
A philosophical view of the landscape.
What is universal knowledge technology?
Knowledge = theory + information that reduces uncertainty.
What is theory?
Any conditional or unconditional assertion, axiom or constraint used for reasoning about the world.
What are structured, semi-, & unstructured information?
Types of data representation that semantic technologies unify.
What is value?
The measure of the worth or desirability of something. The foundation of meaning.
What is knowledge representation?
Application of theory, values, logic, & ontology to the task of constructing computable patterns of some domain.
What are the problems in processing knowledge?
Complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, and equivocality.
Pattern and language:
How do humans encode thoughts, represent knowledge, and share meanings?
Using patterns and language.
What is a key limitation of natural language?
Inherent ambiguity resulting from overloaded symbol use.
What is visual language?
Words, images and shapes, tightly integrated into communication units.
Why is visualization important?
Patterns provide a 60% faster way to locate, navigate, and grasp meanings.
How is knowledge different from content?
Content is merely an expression of knowledge.
Terminology-based knowledge representation:
What is tagging?
Attaching labels to photos, videos, text, web sites, and other web resources in order to categorize them.
What is folksonomy?
Categorizing information using spontaneously chosen tags.
What are dictionaries, glossaries, and lexicons?
Listings of terms with definitions and other features.
What is taxonomy?
A hierarchical or associative ordering of terms.
What are folk taxonomies?
A category hierarchy with 5-6 levels that has its most cognitively basic categories in the middle.
What is a thesaurus?
A compendium of synonyms and related terms.
Concept and model-based knowledge representation:
What are semantic networks?
Concepts organized as a graph or web of relationships.
What is a model?
A representation of an actual or conceptual system.
What are semantic models?
Semantic models are ontologies. They are like and unlike other IT models.
What is an ontology?
A formal explicit specification of a shared conceptualization.
How do ontology-like things compare?
Different types of knowledge representation deliver different capabilities.
How do terminological and formal ontologies differ?
Formal ones state axioms and definitions in logic.
Can we state sophisticated ontologies using language that both machines and people understand?
Easy. Use a subset of English or other natural language.
Logical theory-based knowledge representation:
What is logic?
A subset of natural language used for reasoning.
What are the four kinds of reasoning?
Induction, abduction, deduction, and analogy.
What is the relationship between application needs, reasoning & knowledge representation?
No reasoning without representation.
Standards for knowledge representation:
What are semantic web standards for knowledge representation and reasoning?
RDF/S, OWL, SPARQL, RIF.
What is Common Logic?
A human and machine understandable unification of logic that allows standards interoperability.
What intelligence community R&D results will extend Web 3.0 knowledge representation and reasoning?
WordNet 3.0, TimeML, and IKRIS Knowledge Language.
Search:
What do search technologies do?
Look for relevant information based on some criteria.
What are search engines?
Software that helps users find content from the web, databases, or their desktop based on some criteria.
Pattern reasoning:
What is machine learning?
Any process by which a system improves performance from experience*.
What is pattern recognition?
Techniques that distinguish signal from noise.
What is clustering?
Process of organizing objects into groups whose members are similar in some way.
What is data mining?
The process of finding hidden patterns and relationships in data sets.
What is a semantic data warehouse?
A virtual repository for all or parts of the data that an enterprise’s various business systems collects.
Natural language processing:
What is natural language processing?
Recognizing and interpreting the meaning of spoken and written speech.
What are text mining and text analytics?
Discovering concepts, connections, patterns, correlations, trends, etc. in written language.
Semantic discovery:
What is semantic discovery?
Extracting meaningful concepts and relationships from text or other data sources.
What are the levels of semantic discovery?
Statistical pattern matching to theory-based reasoning.
What is semantic discovery of IT artifacts?
Scanning source libraries, schemas and documentation to map process functions, links and dependencies.
What is semantic legal e-discovery?
Using knowledge of the legal case, subject matter, linguistics, & community context to improve search.
Analytics:
What are analytics?
Studying the constituent parts of something and their relation to the whole.
What are relationship analytics?
Discovering complex connections, patterns, correlations, & trends between previously disassociated data points.
What are perpetual analytics?
Performing real-time analytics on data streams to find and publish relationships to historical knowledge.
What is sequence neutrality?
No matter the order of queries or data entries, the end-state, once all data points are known, is the same.
What is semantic business intelligence?
Making fact-based decision-making more proactive, real-time, and widely deployed across the enterprise.
Intelligence and question answering:
What is sense making?
Detecting and connecting information to build understanding of a situation.
What is semantic situation handling?
Model-driven situation recognition, problem-solving and decision-making, execution methods, and governance.
What is semantic information fusion?
Ontology-driven data merging, situation awareness, and impact understanding.
What is question answering?
Extracting an answer to a request (a question) posed in natural language, based on a corpus.
What is advanced question answering?
Handling complex question scenarios in an open domain with multiple media, languages & data types.
What is semantic research?
Helping people access just the information they’re interested in and then report it just the way they want.
Semantic User Experience (SEX)
“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”
— Charles Mingus
What’s in the semantic user experience section?
User experience, identity, context awareness, mobility, semantic browsing, and intelligent user interface.
SEX Definition & Drivers:
What is semantic user experience?
Sharing, connecting, and adding intelligence to make digital life easier, more useful, more enjoyable.
What computing metaphors shape our thinking about user experience?
What are the drivers for semantic user experience?
What are semantic user experience considerations?
Put users in control. Exceed user expectations for simplicity and functionality. Make it effortless.
Do what I mean. Find what I need. Be aware of what I know. Help me make sense. Answer questions.
Help me collaborate. Handle languages. Marshal facts. Analyze trade-offs. Communicate concisely.
What are the elements of great user experience?
Make it easy to be happy, and usability, user-experience, and greatness will come all by itself.*
What is the role of values in user experience?
Values shape user experience.
What role do emotional states play in user experience?
Emotion is the “experience” in user experience.
SEXy Identity Management:
What is identity?
Information used to establish or prove the individuality of a person as a persisting entity.
What is OpenID?
An email address for life!
What is Garlik?
Giving individuals and their families real power over use of their personal information in the digital world!
What is an avatar?
A virtual representation, visualization, and persona of a player in a game or synthetic reality.
What will Web 4.0 personal appliances be like?
Your personal global control center, and “the world in a grain of sand.”
SEXy Context Management:
What is attention management?
Natural interaction with more information in more contexts, without overwhelming users.
What is context?
The interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs.
What is context aware?
Sensing, predicting, interpreting, and responding to situations and events.
What are context-aware games?
Anything can & will be part of a game!
SEXy Mobility:
What about mobility and services?
Mobile devices are already networked. Services exist.
What is a mobsite?
A consumer mobile website.
SEXy Browsing:
What is semantics-aware web browsing?
Information brokering and machine interpreted metadata rather than just HTML rendering.
Remixing the web and do-it-yourself mashups.
What are semantic portals and dashboards?
User interfaces that enable interactive conversations with data and events.
What is telepresence?
Being fully present at a live real world location remote from one’s own physical location.
Who do we find in Second Life?
Individuals in the guise of personal avatars.
Is semantic “Croquet” the future of UI?
A key trend is towards immersive 3D user interface powered by semantic technologies.
What is reality browsing?
Query the physical world live and up close from anywhere!
SEXy Intelligent Interface:
What is intelligent user interface?
Processing knowledge to help users interact intuitively and transparently with computing devices.
What are components of intelligent user interfaces?
Sensors, knowledge models, reasoners, and effectors.
What is autonomous navigation?
You know where you are, have paths to get where you want to go, and can respond to the unexpected.
What is post-personal computing?
Appliance computing.
What is the emerging display landscape?
Everywhere: smart cars and traffic, public spaces, smart homes & offices, personal apparel.
What is augmented reality?
Bringing the power of the web to the point of decision.
Semantic Social Computing
“The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.”
— Linus Pauling
What’s in the semantic social computing section?
The role of semantic technologies in a range of social computing applications.
Definitions and Drivers:
What is semantic social computing?
Intelligent connecting technologies for social communication, information literacy, and cooperation.
What are technologies of cooperation?
The co-evolution of tools and social practices to support ever more complex forms of cooperative society.
Capability clusters that amplify cooperation.
What are the drivers for semantic social computing?
What is the power law of participation?
1% of the people create content; 10% will modify content that’s there.
What is the wisdom of crowds?
Aggregated opinions of the many are smarter than consensus decisions of the few.
Semantic Social Computing Applications, Part 1:
What is semantics-aware instant messaging?
Systems that understand conversations, keep track of concepts, & let you act on communication.
What is semantic email?
Profiles, threads, topics, contents, and addresses that both humans and machines can act on.
What is a semantic desktop?
Managing every piece of information a person encounters through their computer using ontologies.
What is a semantic webtop?
Web 3.0 knowledge computing and dataspace concepts applied to distributed personal information management.
What is a semantic blog?
Personal web journal + machine interpretable semantic annotations + personal ontologies.
What is semantic bookmarking?
Associating links to web resources with externally represented concepts in a domain ontology.
What is a semantic tag cloud?
Folksonomy + semantic relationships mapped between tags, users, and site resources.
What is a semantic social network?
Web of people, content, sites, and profiles co-authored and coordinated using machines.
What are smart mobs?
Groups of people who meet online to complete tasks that they jointly consider important.
What are social operating systems?
Software platforms enabling systematic management and facilitation of human social relationships and interactions.
Semantic Social Computing Applications, Part 2:
What is semantic content management?
Modeling knowledge. Generating content. Improving access.
What are collective knowledge systems?
Web 3.0 “killer apps.”
What is a semantic uSite?
A collaborative website with user-generated content linked to a machine-interpretable knowledge model.
What is a semantic wiki?
A read-write website that includes an underlying model of the knowledge described in its pages.
What capabilities does a semantic wiki provide?
So many good things, it’ll make your head spin.
What is a semantic agent wiki?
Web 3.0 platform for collaborative content creation, knowledge management, and software development.
What is semantic e-learning?
Mobile, embedded, in-context, personal, just-in-time, and on-demand.
Semantic Applications
“Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough.”
— George Washington Carver
What’s in the section on semantic applications?
Semantic application concepts, enterprise processes and applications, knowledge computing & intelligent systems.
Definitions and Drivers:
What are semantic applications?
Software that puts knowledge to work.
What are the drivers for semantic applications?
What are some application capabilities of semantic technologies?
How do semantic applications differ from conventional approaches?
Semantic commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) applications:
What enterprise processes will be semantically enabled?
Virtually all processes that are supported by commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software.
What is semantic ERP?
The integration of all aspects of business and its systems using an enterprise ontology.
What is semantic CRM?
Knowledge-driven adaptive customer information and proactive customer-facing services.
What are two applications of “adaptive learning” & “proactive” customer relationship management?
What is semantic PLM?
Knowledge driven research, development, manufacturing, and customer support.
Knowledge-based applications:
What is knowledge-based engineering?
Semantic model and simulation driven research, design, development, manufacturing, and operations.
What are semantic SCADA applications?
Using semantic models to configure, provision, and manage application software execution.
What is semantic supply chain management?
Moving from inflexible, hard-coded processes to agile, autonomic, and autonomous process navigation.
What is semantic planning and scheduling?
Ontology-driven sequences of action in dynamic, unpredictable, & typically multi-agent domains.
What is policy-based computing?
Using semantic models to configure, provision, and manage application software execution.
What are semantic risk and compliance applications?
Using semantic models to manage policy, processes, data models, and behaviors of people & machines.
What is the geospatial semantic web?
Geography-on-demand joins knowledge-with-location.
What are semantic mashups?
Composite applications. “Killer apps” for the semantic web!
What are semantic geospatial mashups?
Using knowledge models to automatically map information from varied sources together by location.
Intelligent systems:
What is knowledge computing?
Reasoning over dynamic, declarative semantic models rather than execution of rote algorithmic procedures.
What is semantic simulation?
Declarative knowledge models used to represent, predict, test, and refine the behavior of a system of interest.
What is in silico research and development?
Nature-inspired modeling, simulation and testing to accelerate scientific discovery.
What are intelligent agents?
Building blocks for autonomic intellectual property and declarative computing ecosystems.
What are intelligent systems?
Systems that know, learn, and reason as people do.
What is a cognitive system?
One that knows what it’s doing.
What is the key challenge for intelligent, cognitive, knowledge computing systems?
Dealing with the messiness of the real world.
Complex systems:
What are some properties of complex systems?
Self-organization. Co-evolution. Emergence.
What is emergence?
Complex patterns of behavior arising out of the interactions of simple agents.
What is swarm intelligence?
Many agents. No central control. Local knowledge. Emergent behaviors that transcend individual ones.
Autonomic and Autonomous Systems:
What are autonomic products & services?
Self-aware capabilities that manage their whole life-cycle.
What are robots?
Autonomous semantic agents that sense, respond, learn, and take autonomous action in an environment.
What is “Nanospyder?”
A semantically-enabled, eco-friendly concept car.
What are smart textiles and interactive fabrics?
Computers, communicators, sensors, and acutators integrated into textiles and other materials.
What is printed intelligence?
Smart paper, stick-on intelligence, self-aware packaging, flexible displays, lighting, signage, memory, and more.
What are blogjects?
Networked objects that participate in our ongoing social dialog.
What are spime?
Objects with a cradle-to-cradle digital life history.
Semantic Infrastructure
“The goal of semantic technology is to make heterogeneous systems interoperable despite differences in implementation. The semantic approach shifts the focus of system design from computer-oriented features to the meaning of those features in terms of the people, places, things, and events in the world outside the computer.”
— John Sowa
What’s covered in the section on semantic infrastructure?
Trends in computing architecture, storage, transport, processor, display, development, and ecosystem.
Definitions and Drivers:
What is infrastructure?
Basic structure or enabling features of a system or organization such as facilities, services, and installations.
What is semantic infrastructure?
A knowledge plane interconnects and enables reasoning across all layers of the ICT stack.
Reality check: Where are semantics in ICT today?
Everywhere, but not in the right way.
What are the drivers for semantic infrastructure?
Why do we need semantic infrastructure?
Semantic technologies can solve problems of scale, complexity, function, security, performance & agility.
What are key trends in distributed computing?
Moore’s law, Metcalf’s law, Amdahl’s law, & Coopers law.
What are technology drivers for semantic ecosystem?
Systems of artifacts, pervasive computing, new design paradigms, and autonomicity.
What are key trends towards semantic infrastructure?
Semantic Computing Architecture, Part 1:
How is net-centric infrastructure evolving?
How is net-centric infrastructure evolving?
Four streams of innovation converge on semantic technologies for net-centric infrastructure.
What is web-scale computing?
Global infrastructure(s) with millions of server, storage, and networking elements.
Why is semantic architecture needed?
Net-centric scale, complexity, and ubiquity make central planning, object orientation, and stack models obsolete.
What is a computing architecture?
Design of the structures, behaviors, and rationale of a system.
What are computing architecture styles?
Patterns of structural organization, with a vocabulary of components, connectors, and combinatorial constraints.
What is semantic enterprise architecture?
An executable conceptual blueprint that defines the structure, resources, and operation of an organization.
What is semantic model-driven architecture?
Specification of business policy and functionality that is instantiated for execution on one or more platforms.
Semantic Computing Architecture, Part 2:
What is semantic integration?
Linking info sources, workflows & processes through knowledge models, rather than hard-coded interfaces.
What are levels of interoperability?
Stand-alone, technical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, dynamic, and conceptual.
What is semantic interoperability?
Mutually consistent interpretation of intention and shared knowledge within a situational and purposeful context.
What are context-aware services?
Entities that complete tasks on their own, discover other services, and use them to compose new functionality.
What is semantic event-driven architecture?
System components perform services in reaction to external occurrences.
What is semantic service oriented architecture?
Using machine interpretable policies, practices, and descriptions to share functionality between components.
What is role & value of semantic technology in SOA?
Reduced cost to interconnect systems across silos; increased asset reuse; and greater business agility.
Semantic Storage, Part 1:
How do we survive the information avalanche?
“We must harness the internet’s energy before the information it has unleashed buries us.” — Vint Cerf
What drives storage capability, performance, & cost?
Quantity of data, the complexity of its structure, its deployment, and kinds of reasoning performed over it.
What is the trend towards semantic storage?
From flat files to bases, to spaces, to knowledge webs.
What is relational database management system technology?
RDBMSs store data in tables.
Where is RDBMS technology headed?
Through 2010, expect more extensions to the RDBMS model.
What is object DBMS technology?
ODBMSs store data as object models that are interpreted using the methods specified for their class.
What is a triple/quad storage technology?
Triple stores manage subject-predicate-object strings.
What is graph database mgmt. system technology?
Graph databases store data as nets of nodes and arcs.
Semantic Storage, Part 2:
What is the space of data management solutions?
It varies by administrative proximity and level of semantic integration.
What is a dataspace?
Dataspaces connect and manage heterogeneous data stores.
What is semantic data maturity?
From chaos, to repeatable structure, to defined content, to managed relationships, to optimized semantics.
Semantic Transport:
What are key semantic transport trends?
Bandwidth explosion. Ubiquity. Mobility means context. Grids move beyond stacks. Knowledge webs.
What are the regulatory implications of EOIP?
New battles loom as boundaries between telephony, cable, broadcast, and wireless communications blur.
What are security challenges for semantic ecosystems?
Concept-level transparency is key to evolving fine grain, autonomic, and effective security mechanisms.
What is semantic mobility?
Easy to create, self-describing, context-aware services.
What is ubiquitous semantic mobility?
The intelligent physical world communicates with us.
What are unified communications?
Converged services for voice, web, data, video, with intelligence in the core network and the edge devices.
What is a service-oriented knowledge utility (SOKU)?
Grid services & content use semantics that automate dynamic composition and autonomic reasoning.
Semantic Processors:
What is multi-core, multi-thread processing?
Key hardware trends requiring breakthroughs to simplify programming of concurrent and distributed applications.
Semantic Software Development, Part 1:
What are key trends towards semantic software development?
How are standards, value creation, and categories of software artifacts evolving with the web?
Towards knowledge-centric patterns of computing.
What are knowledge-centric patterns of computing?
What is a semantic application platform?
A foundation for building intelligent, net-centric solutions.
How do semantic technologies enable integration and interoperability of different forms of knowledge?
Common machine representation interrelates them.
How do collective knowledge systems learn & evolve?
Users collaborate to add content, semantics, models, and behaviors. The system gets better with use.
Semantic Software Development, Part 2:
What are the elements of user experience design?
User needs, site objectives, functional specifications, interaction, information, navigation & visual design.
What is the methodology for user experience design?
Understand, model, prototype, test, and improve iteratively.
What is goal-oriented software engineering?
Declaring knowledge separately from application code to enable autonomic, and autonomous solutions.
What are some principles for multi-agent systems?
Environment is an active process. A flock is not a big bird. Emergent behavior is distributed. Think small.
How is software’s space vs. time trade-off evolving?
Smart data trumps procedural algorithms.
What makes semantic solutions different?
Webs of meanings and knowledge. Systems that know and can share what they know. Architectures of learning.