The Semantic Web

At MIT, in Boston yesterday I met for an hour with Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the World Wide Web) to discuss our early plans to explore how the Semantic Web can be applied to real business challenges we have.

The Semantic Web has been attracting a lot of attention recently with initial applications up and running in many places (of which more in a few weeks time). The trouble is that it's hard to define to a laymen.

My own definition is:
The sematic web is a goal – a future evolution of the word wide web – where data itself has embedded “meaning” that allows it to be understood and used automatically to perform complex tasks that currently require human “intelligence

In other words:
The www is about link between web pages
The sw is about relationships between things

For example - at present if you find a photograph on the internet of a place you'd like to visit there are a number of (sometimes tricky) manual steps to find out - exactly where the photo was taken, finding other photos, perhaps some write ups on others' experiences of visiting, information on how to get there etc. In the seamntic web - all of that information would be automtically associated and easy to find.

Flickr problems explained

The good people at Flickr posted a blog entry to explain why their mighty system went a bit haywire a couple of days ago: "Tonight's problem - an explaination.

I'm struck by a few things
1) How enormous Flickr has become - up to a billion images served each day!!!! And yet most people have never heard of Flickr! The Internet is BIG!
2) The informality of their explaination. It's quite sincere, and yet not in the usual "business speak" that say a corporate IT shop would use to explain any problems it has suffered. (I wonder if they'd "get off" with that if Flickr was a business critical app???)
3) As usual with any application (or anything) that is a success is their attention to detail. The permalink for the blog posting points to a page called "crapola.html"!!!!!

Pipes: rewire the web

Lots of hype around Yahoo's launch of Pipes. Lots of well deserved hype in my view.

Of course this is only the first step in something that will become BIG very soon. I'm half way through reading a book "Mashup Corporation" - written by Paul Kurchina (who I've been in contact for years and will hopefully meet soon) and Andy Mullholland (CTO for Capgemini) - a chroncle of "service oriented business transformation".

Here is a blurb "If you thought the first decade of the Internet was disruptive, you aint seen nothin' yet" "the next generation of web-related services and technologies is unleashing a raft of [new] business models that will reorganise the planet"

I tend to agree.

A few years ago I looked to help a friends very "physical" business go online - what he wanted to do needed to be custom built and would have cost too much. We could implement what he wanted today in an afternoon for almost free!!!

Pipes will bring a consumer slant to a concpet that will change the way we think about providing business functionality!

I'll leave O'Reilly to have the last (enthusiastic) word on this

Virtual Worlds and Croquet

I had a very interesting conversation with Julian Lombardi yesterday. He is one of the key drivers behind the Croquet Consortium who develop Open Source solutions for creating and deploying "deeply collaborative multi-user online applications"

With all the hype around Second Life it is good to recall that it's not entirely suited to solid business applications and that Croquet can be a much better platform. Business applications include:

1 Virtual Incident Command and Control

2 Educational and Training Environments

3 Advanced Visualisation

There is also an entirely new family of applications based on realising value from the creation of assets in the virtual world. (Not to be confused with creating a virtual physical world as in SL - but creating "assets" that represent information. Like "wikis on steroids" – evolving through collective actions of individuals)

Does it sound SF-like? Watch how quickly this evolves even by the end of the decade!!

Google's Master Plan

Google's Master Plan
Originally uploaded by jurvetson.

I don't know how I missed this on Steve Jurvetson's stream before.

An image of a somewhat tongue in cheek Google Master Plan! (Just how much tongue in cheek would be good to know)

Has to be seen BIG.

Google OS seems to have attracted a lot of attention. I wonder!???

Interesting that Richard Branson is just one step from a Rouge Scientist!!

Interesting too that this image has had 129,000 views on Flickr which is a vast number for an individual photo - so I'm guessing this has been blogged many times in the 20 months since it was posted.

The end of SAP as we know it?

I recently was on the judging panel of this year's IT Innovation awards. I was struck by how quickly software as a service is being adopted by small and medium sized enterpises! (Can't go it the exact examples much for now - until after the awards themselves).

So perhaps I'm especially tuned into articles such as this....
» IPO candidate NetSuite fires a shot at SAP | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

It seems very obvious to me that core functionality in the future will come from services usch as this. Businesses will benefit from It in the way they bolt of unique functionality arround these core services.

Of course big-corporate-IT will probably deny that this is likley to impact them.......but it will. A few more data points will give an idea of exactly when.

Worth watching!