Incubators for Today's Semantic Data

by Mitchell Ummel, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

In recent months, I've been casually tracking, on a nearly daily basis, the latest generation of Web-based mashups through a community portal I configured using a mashup of Joomla! and Yahoo! Pipes called MashUpUniverse. Like a Web-based "canary in a coal mine," I've envisioned that I've set the content feed aggregator "dials" to alert me of the emergence of Web 3.0 (and the subsequent demise of Web 2.0). What I've observed during the past six months is that the majority of mashup activity has trended around and among combinations of the following types of services:

• Microblogging services, such as Twitter and Facebook

• Location services, such as Google Earth and Yahoo! Maps

• Entertainment-based services, such as iTunes, Netflix, XM Radio, and YouTube

• Content-based services, such as weather sites, news organizations, and knowledge aggregators, including the New York Times and Wikipedia

Calling any of the innovative, new applications that we see on a daily basis at MashUpUniverse a "true" semantically aware application (SAA) is certainly debatable. Several things we can say is that these mashups are meshing data and services from two or more sources and realizing an entirely new application (be it semantically aware or not), which, if successful, becomes much more than the sum of its parts.

More important, and through modes I described in a recent Business Intelligence Executive Update (see "The Semantic Web 3.0 Mashup Universe: Coming to a Browser Near You," Vol. 9, No. 4), most of these new applications, or mashups of those applications, are also autogenerating new "organic" RDF content for future SAAs to build on.

Real World Wide Semantic Web Usuage Scenarios

Use cases for future SAAs are fun to visualize. Here's a couple examples.

Use Case 1

My guest and I are on a business trip in a rental car driving through Chicago. We have four hours to kill before our business meeting. I'm not familiar with the area (my Semantic Web-attached GPS "knows" this -- why shouldn't it?). So it suggests an itinerary for us based on a number of factors, including (1) our interests (latest computer gadgetry and classical art), (2) our recent experiences (I haven't been to a computer superstore in three months, and my guest has never seen Van Gogh's "Starry Night"), and (3) our location (these services are close by and there's a traffic-friendly route between them). As a bonus (I didn't ask, you must realize), my GPS suggests, through its interface with IDGM, that our itinerary leaves just enough time for lunch at a local seafood restaurant. The GPS knows this due to our location, our planned routes, time of day (11 am), our general/shared food preferences, and the fact that neither of us has recently dined on seafood in the past week.

Use Case 2

Using my new Semantic Web "browser",¹ I type in (or speak or the Web just "knows" without my asking), my simple request: "Please give me three options by 5 pm today, with pricing and full itinerary, for an enjoyable four-day spring break trip for my family to someplace warm." We can all imagine how an automated Web "agent," even today, could pull together options and costs for airfare, cruise, rental car, itinerary, and lodging across the smorgasbord of travel services already in place on the Internet. That's not enough. In order to fully "grok" this request, the semantic agent of the future must know a little more about who I am, what relationships I have (in this case, understanding the term "family" in the context of who I am), and what my family's travel preferences may be (in this case, interpreting the term "enjoyable" in the context of who my family is). The agent may be able to infer additional and deeper understanding of my request, through navigation of the Semantic Web (at least our family's slice of IDGM that I've made available to share), and infer additional meaning from facts as diverse as "families like us enjoyed vacations to warm places such as...." or "our family had a bad experience on a holiday cruise to the Bahamas three years ago" or "our family generally takes spring break vacations in the price range of...."

Using today's mashup technologies and secure access to today's existing semantic data stores, I suggest that each of these scenarios could be realized as a SAA today.

I welcome your comments on this Advisor and encourage you to send your insights to me at mummel@cutter.com.

-- Mitchell Ummel, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

Notes

¹What do we call it when we interact with Web 3.0, aka the Semantic Web? We need to invent a new word. In the "old school" Web 1.0-Web 2.0, we described our interactions as using a Web browser, browsing, Googling, looking it up on the Web, and/or surfing the Internet. These remain good descriptions for navigating billions of pages of static HTML "documents" in a not-so-intelligent Internet world. In the Web 3.0/Semantic Web of the future, humans will interact with the entire World Wide Web of semantically linked data, and "it" will know us, respond to us (through artificial intelligence, inference engines, etc.), and eventually, interact on its own with us, much as a human interacts with another intelligent human. In reverence to one of my favorite writers, Robert Heinlein, author of the sci-fi classic Stranger in a Strange Land, I propose resurrection of the term "grok" or "grokking" -- this is what I believe to be the perfect word to describe how we will interact with Web 3.0. For more about "grok," see Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok.