Meaningful Data » semantic web

Announcing: Nimble!

Rachel — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 04:18:51 +0000

Since the beginning of the year I’ve been researching, writing, and editing a report called Nimble: A Razorfish report on publishing in the digital age. It launched this week, and so far the response has been really great. I’ve written about it over on Scatter/Gather and you can view or download the report itself at http://nimble.razorfish.com. There’s even a Twitter account for it (@NimbleRF).

In June I’ll be doing a presentation about report at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco. And there will be other presentations and developments in the coming months.

What else? I wrote a couple other pieces for Scatter/Gather:

Content Strategy Stories from the Frontline (SXSW wrapup)
Busy Times for Content Strategy (CS Forum 2010 wrapup)

And I’m helping to organize two interesting events for Internet Week next week:

Razorfish Screening: We Live in Public (by invitation only)
Razorfish: Living in Public (open event, RSVP on Facebook)

Hope to see you there!

SXSW Panel Picker: Please Vote!

Rachel — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 19:27:10 +0000

This year I’m determined to present at SXSW. To that end, I’m involved in five (5!) proposals. Two of them are talks, and the rest are panels submitted by other people that, SXSW-gods willing, I will be participating in.

SXSW likes to have the community get involved in deciding what panels will be chosen for the conference, so they use this Panel Picker to let people indicate which ones are of greatest interest. It’s free and easy to register to vote, so please consider voting for these proposals:

Understanding Content: The Stuff We Design For – my solo presentation
Content & Semantics: The Wild, Wild Web of Data – a dual presentation I’ll give with Rahel Anne Bailie of Intentional Design Inc.
Why Your Content Sucks and How to Fix It – a panel I’ll be on, moderated by Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic
Let’s Talk About CS: Understanding Content Strategy – a panel I’ll be on, organized by Elena Melendy, an Independent Content Strategy Consultant
Tales from the Basement: Makers of Geek Documentaries – a panel in the SXSW Film conference which I hope to moderate, organized by Jason Scott of Bovine Ignition Systems

While you’re in there, here are some other really interesting panels by some of my friends and colleagues. Please consider voting for these as well!

Adventures in Text and Filmmaking: Making GET LAMP, Jason Scott, Bovine Ignition Systems
Web Re-Design Cage Match: Refreshing the Online Experience, Anh Dang, New York Times
Conserving The Web’s Social Ecology: Theory and Practice, Tim Hwang, The Web Ecology Project (plus a few other cool presentations by Tim)
Your Cell Phone is Your Sugar Daddy (Controlling Diabetes), John Pettengill, Razorfish
The UX of Mobile, Kyle Outlaw, Razorfish
Social Networking for Dealers: Cultivate Relationships First, Mary Butler, Razorfish
Context Strategy: Wrangling Content Gone Wild, Patrick Nichols, Razorfish
Greening Your Content: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Rahel Anne Bailie,Intentional Design Inc.
Content Strategy FTW, Kristina Halvorson, Brain Traffic
Oh, Go Service Yourself! Interactive Content for Humans, Colleen Jones,threebrick
Keep ‘Em Coming: Courting Customers with Content, Colleen Jones,threebrick

There are many others that will probably be amazing, and I haven’t even touched on all the ones about the Semantic Web (will have to write a separate post for that), so get started voting now – you only have until September 4th!

Semantic Web for Publishers

Rachel — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 21:27:16 +0000

When I got back from the Semantic Technology Conference last month, I helped my colleague, Domenic Venuto, write a piece for MinOnline about the things magazine publishers should know about the Semantic Web. I summed up some of the most relevant presentations at SemTech this year, and why I think these things should be important to publishers. Domenic put it all into the context of the work we do with our Media and Entertainment clients, and we worked together to try to express why they should really get moving on this stuff now!

After the article came out, Semantic Universe posted video from a lot of the talks that I mentioned. Very interesting, if you want more detail:

Tom Tague’s Keynote about OpenCalias’ first year
An executive round table on Semantic Search
The Publishers Panel
Closing Keynote with The New York Times announcement

Semantic Web takes root at the IA Summit

Rachel — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:22:16 +0000

At the recent IA Summit, I was surprised and delighted to see how many talks there were about the Semantic Web. Before this emerging technology can really catch on, we will need more Information Architects and Interaction Designers who understand the potential and can design elegant solutions to real problems (both user problems and business problems). In some ways, I wish the conversation were further along, but I realize that it has to start somewhere. The fact that the subject exploded onto the scene in such a big way is a good indication that Web 3.0 is on a lot of people’s minds.

These are the talks I saw:

In A Fundamental Disruption, Peter Sweeney and Robert Barlow-Busch posed the question “How do IAs design for information that’s self-organizing?” They showed several current products designed for use by consumers (as opposed to “information professionals”), including Freebase, Calais, Zepheira’s Remix, and their own product Primal Fusion. I was a little disappointed that, when it came to addressing the question “What does this mean for IA?” they raised the question, pointed to Kevin Kelly’s TED Talk, and didn’t have much more to say about it.

Chiara Fox took a different approach. In her talk, The Semantic Web: What IAs Need to Know About Web 3.0, she outlined the basics, starting with a hand-drawn visual depiction of the historic scenario described in that foundational Scientific American article from 2001. An evocative portrayal, but perhaps she spent too much time on that, since the Semantic Web community has moved beyond that particular vision, and even Fox herself admitted, “This hasn’t come true, eitght years later. And some parts of it make me a little queasy.” (She was referring, primarily, to concerns about trust and privacy).

But next she pulled out the bits of that vision that are still of interest: sharing data, smart agents, and using a wide variety of platforms to interact with the “web”. She went on to explain the underlying concepts that would be important to understand in order to design for this vision. I know from experience that this requires walking a very fine line between being too technical and being too abstract. She seemed, to me, to strike a good balance, but I’m not sure how it came across to people who were hearing about this stuff for the first time.

In Discovering & Mining the Everyday, Richard Ziade and Tim Meaney (from arc90, makers of Readibility) focused more on Tim Berners-Lee’s current stance on the Semantic Web, with particular attention to the data-sharing aspect. The principal is that data will fuel the Semantic Web – massive amounts of data, generated by everyone’s online activities. What would make people want to share that data, or generate new data that might be useful to others? Meaney and Ziade propose (as I’ve also suggested) that in order for the Semantic Web to take off, it will need to provide compelling consumer tools that exploit our self interest. Tools along the lines of flickr, delicious, and last.fm, where users provide useful shared data primarily as a byproduct of activities that serve their own personal needs. The speakers also touched on the privacy issue, but mostly to point out that we’ve started to become accustomed to giving up privacy in exchange for the value that services provide us.

Chris Thorne gave a talk called Ubiquitous Information Architecture: Building for change and web 3.0 in which he spoke about the BBC’s work with Semantic Web principals, focusing on the architecture of a very specific type of information: URIs. Uniform Resource Identifiers are key to the success of the Semantic Web, because being able to assign each concept a unique and persistant ID makes sharing data a lot more accurate. Still, I’m not sure this was quite the right audience for this talk.

I’m hoping that this is just the beginning of these types of presentations and discussions, and I can’t wait to see what kind of work this inspires.

Semantic Web for Dummies

Rachel — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 21:46:25 +0000

Jeff Pollock has just released a book called Semantic Web for Dummies. Over at Semantic Universe you can download a free chapter (registration required), order the book, or read Jeff’s blog posts. I haven’t read the book yet, but Jeff is a really smart person with the ability to speak plainly and compellingly. This book is bound to be useful for people who are trying to understand the Semantic Web, or are still struggling with how to explain it to others. I just put my copy on order.

FEED: The Razorfish Consumer Experience Report 2008

Rachel — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:44:36 +0000

Yes, I’ve been neglecting this blog, but it doesn’t mean I haven’t been productive. My employer (which has changed it’s name back to Razorfish) has published another book, which contains an article by me about semantic web and user-generated data. You can see the whole, beautifully designed document online. My article is on page 60. Congratulations to my colleagues who also contributed to the book.

SXSW Panels

Rachel — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:07:27 +0000

The SXSW panel picker is live, and I proposed two panels. If you’re going, or you might go, or you just like voting for things, please have a look and consider voting for my proposals. You’ll have to create an account to vote, but it should be pretty painless. Here are the descriptions of the panels I proposed:

When the Semantic Web Meets User Generated Metadata

The Semantic Web promises to make the internet smarter, in part by adding structure and definition around the content on the web. Sounds great, but who’s going to do all the work? As User Generated Content gives rise to User Generated Metadata, turns out it’s going to be… YOU! (Click here to vote for it)

Content Content Revolution: The Rise of Content Strategy

What’s Content Strategy, you ask? Navigation, publishing guidelines, taxonomy, syndication, style guides, UGC strategy, the semantic web? All this and more! Come hear some of the leading content strategy professionals discuss where this emerging discipline came from, why it matters, and where it’s going. (Click here to vote for it)

On another note, I didn’t get a chance to post my fourth (and last) post about The Last HOPE before I went out of town for the weekend, and I forgot to bring my notes. So that will have to wait until I get back next week.

STC 2008 – Day 4

Rachel — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:56:46 +0000

The last day of the Semantic Technology Conference has a few morning panels, a closing keynote, and then some afternoon seminars. But the day is really about saying goodbye to everyone, finally introducing yourself to a few of the people you’ve been crossing paths with for the past week, and making that annual trip to Koo-ki Sushi. Well, that’s what it’s about for me, anyway.

In the morning I went to a presentation on Semantic MediaWiki. Several guys from Monitor Group spoke about what they’ve learned in the year since they implemented semantic plug-ins on their internal wiki. I was particularly interested in this because at Avenue A | Razorfish we have an enterprise wiki of our own, and I’ve been trying to push to make it more semantically-enabled. The Monitor folks want to start a Semantic MediaWiki User group and and I told them to sign me up.

Then there was the closing keynote, which was about the business model of semantics and what you should tell your colleagues about the conference when you get back to the office. I really loved this panel, because there was a wide range of perspectives and backgrounds represented and they did a great job of, collectively, taking the measure of the event. Everyone has the sense that this is a discussion that’s on the brink of cracking open some major mysteries about the way we use the web, and it’s very exciting to be a part of it. And at the same time, we’re left with the feeling that next year is going to be even more interesting.

I’ll paraphrase some of the insights shared during the closing keynote:

This stuff isn’t all at the beginning of the hype curve, some of it has made a couple cycles already. (That comment was for the folks who are new to the scene) (Jim Hendler)
If you’re describing the value of something as being about semantic technology, you probably haven’t found the real business value yet. (Jeff Pollock)
The key message is simplify – both in how we talk about it and how we do the work. (Jonathan Mack)
“What vs. How” – figure out what we are trying to solve, then figure out how semantic technology can help. (Christine Connors)
There’s a large variety of application areas, so there’s no one business model. There are different communities with different needs. (Ivan Herman)
Semantics has no business model, but it has the potential to disrupt other business models before it creates new ones. LinkedIn would be dead in the water if everyone had a FOAF profile. (Steve Hall)
People forget what the “I” in IT stands for. We’ve been doing a lot of technology without paying a lot of attention to the information side. (John Gilman)
Never say “Ontology”. (John Gilman)

And what to tell your colleagues?

There’s an embarrassment of riches here. (John Gilman)
This isn’t the breakout year for this stuff, but it’s coming soon. (Steve Hall)
Take the right sized step for your project. Just solve one discrete problem at a time, and don’t try to go back and fix everything. (Christine Connors)
There’s a lot of real valuable services that already work. We need to get started before our competitors. The implications for the collaboration model are big. (Jonathan Mack)
In a downturn year, this conference is still growing. (Jeff Pollock)
People have big ideas here. (Jim Hendler)
There’s no reason now not to do this. (Dave McComb)

Then I headed over to Koo-ki Sushi, which is sort of an annual pilgrimage for me when I come to the Semantic Technology Conference. My first year here I presented with Barbara McGlamery and for our talk we made up a fake website called “Confection Connoisseur” (which I used in this year’s presentation a bit too, so it’s actually become a running theme now). In the course of finding photos for our site mockups, we discovered this place Koo-ki Sushi which makes beautiful chocolates in the form of sushi. They’re handmade, and only sold in a little office park store front in San Jose (or you can buy them online). Of course we had to go there, and I make it a point to go back there every year.

I returned in time to go to the second half of a seminar on Entity Extraction tools. This is the part where they were actually describing the tools they evaluated, which is the part I was most interested in. Mostly I’m going to bring this information back to the tech folks and see if they want to investigate further.

Coming Soon: My wrapup of the conference, including other highlights and tidbits not previously mentioned.

Day One: Tutorials (sioc & Freebase), Garlik & Twitter
Day Two: Twine, Zepheira, Blue Organizer, Mainstream Markets & exhibits
Day Three: My presentation, Future Directions, Calais, Rising Stars & my panel

STC 2008 – Day 3

Rachel — Fri, 23 May 2008 16:58:41 +0000

Started out the day with my own presentation – Survey of Taxonomy Tools (follow the link to view the slides). It seemed to be pretty well received, for the most part. I included some time for discussion, and several people contributed interesting comments and questions. I was pretty happy with the turnout considering that this session was first thing in the morning.

After that I was so relieved, I’m surprised I could do anything, but I jumped right back into some interesting presentations, including a panel on Developing Semantic Web Applications, a talk on Calais, and a keynote that included several of the Rising Stars of the Semantic Web. Then I ended the day on the speaking side of the table again.

The panel on Developing Sem Web Apps was subtitled “Current Tools, Best Practices, & Future Directions.” I have to admit, this one was immediately following mine, so I was still having some trouble focusing, even though it included several fascinating people who I really admire. Hopefully there will be an audio file of this one and I can listen to it later sometime.

The presentation on Calais was a short solution session. Thomas Tague described several ways people can use their free semantic tagging service. I’m going to have to try it out, and I’m sure I’ll write about it further here. This is the second time I’ve heard someone mention the Powerhouse Museum collection – semantically tagged and searchable online.

The Rising Stars keynote was a little odd. There are so many incredibly interesting people here, it’s a bit weird to call some of them rising stars. Maybe they mean the companies, or the products. But it still seemed somehow out-of-character for this conference. In any case, what I learned is that I need to take a closer look at Powerset and that “The Killer App for Semantic Technology is Your Life (online)”. Tom Gruber (of Stealth-company.com) was responsible for that last insight. Killer Apps are always a big buzzword at this conference, with some people wondering what and when it will be, and other people arguing that there won’t be one, but that semantics will be used to make all the things you already do that much better. I’m in the latter camp, so Gruber’s comments resonated with me. A sort of 21st century “medium is the message” – it’s not going to be a particular service or site, it’s going to be a fundamental shift in the way we interact with the web.

During the last session of day I participated in a panel called How to Internally Market Semantic Web Technologies in Large Enterprises. I don’t have nearly as much experience as the other members of the panel, but I had a very different perspective because most of the others are engineers, and although we have all had similar struggles with stakeholders, I’ve worked more closely with designers and usability experts and so the resistance I tend to meet has more to do with UI and less to do with technology. I hope that this different perspective brought some additional insights to the panel discussion. If nothing else, at one point I made most of the people in the room crack up. So, on that count at least, I consider it to have been a success.

Day One: Tutorials (sioc & Freebase), Garlik & Twitter
Day Two: Twine, Zepheira, Blue Organizer, Mainstream Markets & exhibits
Day Four: MediaWiki, Closing Keynote Panel, Koo-ki Sushi & Entity Extraction seminar

STC 2008 – Day 2

Rachel — Thu, 22 May 2008 08:23:07 +0000

Started the day out with keynote speeches by Nova Spivack (Radar Networks) & Eric Miller (Zepheira). This was followed by presentations, of which my favorites were on Persistent Identifiers, Blue Organizer, and Bringing Semantics to Mainstream Markets. I closed the day out by going to the vendor exhibits.

Nova talked about what’s going on with Twine. In particular, he talked about some new features that will be rolling out this summer, while the site is still in invite-only beta, and what will be rolling out in the fall when the site becomes open to the public. The main features of interest to me are that the UI will become simpler, and their will be “a lot more semantics.” Admittedly, that’s a bit vague. (A new acquaintance, John Breslin, wrote about it in more detail on his blog).

Then Eric demonstrated various new open source tools, including Remix, which I found really interesting. I knew I would be interested in Remix. Months ago, when I talked to Eric about the premise of my presentation, he told me that I would be interested in Remix. The funny thing is that he always seems apologetic that the UI isn’t more sophisticated, but having recently looked at a lot of the data manipulation tools people are currently using, I can say with confidence that Remix is decades ahead of some of the things that people are muddling through. (Again, John Breslin has written a more detailed post on Eric Miller’s presentation.)

Next I went to see Eric Miller and his colleague David Wood speak about persistent identifiers. They discussed the use of URLs to “point” to real world things or concepts. See purlz.org for more info on this idea.

Alex Iskold gave a presentation of Blue Organizer, from Adaptive Blue. This is a semantically-enabled plug-in for Firefox. I had installed it a while ago, but found out from this presentation that there are a lot features that I haven’t been using. Also talked with Alex afterwards about an odd behavior and he said I should upgrade to the latest version. So, I think I need to reinstall and have a closer look at it. In general, what this tool does is provide specific, contextual actions that you can perform on a page, a link or any bit of text that you might highlight in a web page.

Later, as the exhibits were opening, Jeff Pollock (Oracle) gave a presentation on Bringing Semantics to Mainstream Markets. I thought Jeff was great ever since we met him a few years ago when he was working for Cerebra. First of all Jeff pointed out that Semantic Technology is not itself a market. But there’s a lot of talk this conference about semantics being a “blue ocean opportunity” (in other words: uncontested – get in now before the waters get bloodied!). He talked about how to make a good business case for adopting semantic technologies. This is one that I’m going to have to try to get a copy of so I can show it to the colleagues.

Then the exhibits, and my brain was so full by then that I don’t really remember what I saw. I walked around collecting information, met a couple new people, and talked with some old friends. I’ll sort through the business cards and brochures later and put all the pieces together.

Day One: Tutorials (sioc & Freebase), Garlik & Twitter
Day Three: My presentation, Future Directions, Calais, Rising Stars & my panel
Day Four: MediaWiki, Closing Keynote Panel, Koo-ki Sushi & Entity Extraction seminar