The central problem of the internet today is the relative lack of organization of the massive store of information which already exists, and is continually being generated at rapid rates. With the diversity of personal interests, one persons signal is another ones noise, so finding and keeping track of what you’re interested in becomes an ongoing, repetitive, manual task. The semantic web holds the promise to build a to a living, input-output, web scale topology composed of a hierarchy of topics and relations interwoven through the current silo based system of sites, portals, and files, which have non-uniform systems of organization. This will allow users to easily and finely tune in to the long tail of knowledge and find content with low friction and high precision.

Delivery: From Pull to Push

The current pull model of actively surfing for content using parse-centric search engines will be heavily displaced by a push model in which users passively receive key descriptive metadata about and links to content tightly based on a users subscribed topics of interest, including people, places, events, products, etc. These personalized semantic streams (somewhat like Facebook’s Newsfeed) will aggregate from all over the web, and will become the primary mode of finding and sharing content.

Trust: Patterns of Agreement

Semantic systems will work best when closely paired with intelligent (and ideally, distributed) trust systems, which will accumulate the votes of users with real, cross-vetted identities, about the accuracy and relevance of links between units of data in the semantic topology, in order to derive areas of consensus. These votes will allow for a dynamic recommendation system, effectively turning users into automatic content filters for each other by measuring their aggregate patterns of agreement (or lack thereof). Such systems are already becoming feasible with the emergence of social platforms (ie: Facebook, Open Social, Plaxo, Ning) and open authentication standards (ie: OpenID, OAuth), which can serve as identity hubs to be layered on top of.

Impact: The Feedback Loop

Good information allows for good decisions. Semantic metadata will increasingly create a focused, directed, and personalized flow of information gathered from a distributed network of minds. As this happens, information can be found more quickly and with less friction by more people, and so, allow them to respond faster, more effectively, and in new ways, both individually or collectively. This tightening of the feedback loop will accelerate change (or at least the potential for change) much in the same way that the mainstreaming of the internet itself had on society by opening up new venues and channels for information and interaction. The semantic web represents another such quantum leap, and its impact will be global, multifaceted, and powerful.

Cross posted @ http://veytsel.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/a-semantic-vision/

Authors: James Yue Gee, Max Huang

1. Introduction
In creating the modern generation of enterprise and web applications, we typically integrate information from multiple sources. Relating data from disparate sources presents a challenge of deriving information. However, semantic tools and technologies are evolving that enable us to understand information derived by linking data from different sources, including data from applications, databases, ontologies and content management systems. Semantic technologies and tools support techniques such as tagging online information to make it more readily accessible for data integration. This makes it easier to understand data in relation to other data, even if some of this data is inside your firewall, some is in a business partner’s system, and some is part of the growing collection of useful publicly available data on the web.
LinkedData Planet provides insights into those technologies that enableus to: a) connect data contained in silos within organizations in a meaningful way. b) extract and correlate data from web sites and databases for purposes such as analyzing trends and decision support, customer and vendor relationship management, and social networking
Furthermore, if we put all the service objects, including individuals, communities, organizations, even the whole society (Figure 1) within the framework of telecommunity (Figure 2), we will have a better way to look at and think about “Data Portability”, “Linked Data Planet” and “Semantic Technology”.

2. Telecommunity Based on Semantic Web
Telecommunity is a new social, economic, and technological paradigm which is emerging from
“Semantic Technology” (Figure 3).

The vision of a global, linked data web is a political, and social concept of very great importance — maybe the most important new political development in recent history. This is because such a web structure would be the first fully democratic global knowledge engine. N.J. Slabbert has stated that “civil society is now becoming identical with technological society as defined by Internet use” and that the future of urbanization lies in the creation of “a global urban net”, while Karl Popper has stated that the truly democratic society must be “an open society”. A global, linked data web will unite the concepts of these two thinkers into a new force for democracy. In different parts of the world there are different understandings of what democracy is, and the differences between these understandings is a cause of much of the political strife in the world. A global, linked semantic / data web can help to bring a new era of peace to the world, in which the open access sharing of knowledge is recognized as the most important priority for nations. Thus such a web would make the 21st century truly the Knowledge Economy century. Without such a web the Knowledge Economy is just a phrase but with such a web it will be reality.

Along with the rapid development of internet, we will form a telecommunity based on semantic web. This telecommunity is composed of enterprises, individuals, homes, schools, hospitals, retail shops, and everything possible. These are all the nodes of a huge web of this telecommunity.
For each node, we will have the corresponding Information systems, say, enterprise information systems, individual information systems, home information systems, school information systems, hospital information systems, retailer information systems, and more. Because every nodes are
dealing with data from distributed sources over the web, these information systems are all distributed by themselves. All of these distributed information systems are all connecting, communicating, interoperating, and supporting to each other. So every member of this telecommunity are very well served, and the whole telecommunity is running in very highly efficient and effective manner . This telecommunity is based on semantic web, and it is open to the infinite applications possible happening in the future.

3. Distributed Individual Information Systems
Individuals are the most constituent of a society. His or her activities need sufficient support from Information Technology. Semantic Technology, which is also related to human being’s cognition, will play an important role for this purpose.

In the whole life of any people, he or she needs to interact with a lot of different organizations. For example, one person needs to stay with the family, go to school, see doctor in the hospital, shopping in the store, work for a company, be active in a community, among many others. In one sentence, every people wants to live, study, and work. In this process, each person needs to deal with so much different information which is very useful to both oneself and organizations.

All of these useful information should be collected and stored in a so-called “Distributed Individual Information System”, which is technically based on “Semantic Web”. These all information can be easily accessible to the corresponding responsible entities, no matter it is a person, or it is an organization (Figure 4).

“Distributed Individual Information System” can be used to help individuals to better reflect and summarize the past, do and perform the present, and formulate and plan the future. Thus it is a very important part of telecommunity (Figure 5).

4. Conclusion
Our agenda for research and development on “Telecommunity” can be mentioned as follows:
a. On Demand Business, which is the model of social ecosystems,
b. Service Oriented Enterprise, based on Service Oriented Architecture, which is the technological infrastructure,
c. Individual Information System, which is an important part of industrial movement of “Data Portability”,
d. User Centric Web, which is the user interface of Internet, developing along the line of Web1.0, Web2.0, Web3.0, and more.

5. Reference
a. Mills Davis “Semantic Wave 2008: Industry Roadmap to Web 3.0 Summary & Prospectus” 2007.
b. Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” 2006.
c. N. J. Slabbert “The Future of Urbanization” 2006
d. L. Cherbakov etc. “Impact of Service Orientation at the Business Level” 2005.
e. David Britton “Computer Users’ Needs” 1982
f. David Gelernter “Machine Beauty” 1998

Acknowledgement
Many thanks to Mr.Xin-yi Li, Mr.Jing-sheng Zou, Mr.Jian Huang, Mr.Zhi-yuan Xu, Mr.Dan Gutierrez, and Dr.Carl Bereiter for their answering to our questions in various ways.

Date: 5/1/2008

With this vision, I am working on a social Semantic Web application called StYLiD (an acronym for Structure Your own Linked Data), now available at http://www.stylid.org. A basic demo video is also available at http://www.stylid.org/quickstart.php#video

It enables people to share a wide variety of structured data with the freedom to define their own structured concepts on the fly. Concepts with attributes can be used to model any data. We can also consolidate such multiple small schemas defined by many people to have emerging and evolving concepts. Any user would be able to share structured data simply by filling up system generated forms for such concepts. The system supports creating linked data right from the time of data entry. While submitting new data instances, we can directly input other data instances, as attribute values. It supports the users to simply pick up data from a suggested range of concepts. We may also input any resource URI as the attribute value directly. It enables the user to link to existing vast resources like Wikipedia too. Transparently, the Wikipedia URLs get converted into URIs in the DBpedia linked data repository. Wikipedia is better known and understood by general people. So they would be motivated to link to Wikipedia to make their data more informative and interesting. Thus, while people would still be using simple web interfaces, they would be creating a web of data which machines can crawl and process.

We have already witnessed how the current web of documents has transformed our lives. The Giant Global Graph of open Linked Data will be the next big thing. Linking data will shrink the exploding information space into a small world where any data can be easily reached from anywhere. This will open up a new range of possibilities. Businesses will foster in healthy competition by tapping in this common wealth. The open linked data will truly reflect global interests and drive world politics towards the welfare of everyone. Machines will feed upon the linked data and do useful things for people. This will transform our lives once again. We cannot predict all outcomes of such enormous power. However, we need not be afraid when the entire world is watching and working for the benefit of mankind.

Aman Shakya,
National Institute of Informatics,
Tokyo, Japan

http://www.dynamicorange.com/blog/archives/internet-social-impact/http1984_derefe.html

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