Open Data, Open Government, Open Source, Open Innovation – “Open” everywhere. Today I want to talk about another “Open something”: The “Open Intranet”. This might sound a bit radical but it will also help to reflect a little bit on the term “open” in general.

“Open Intranet” – isn´t this a contradiction by definition? What is understood by “Intranet”? It means a network of computers and users “within” some organisational boundaries. But boundaries don´t necessarily have to be closed as nature teaches us: Organisms aren´t closed systems. A watch would be an example for a closed system but living organisms tend to be open – to survive. Of course they aren´t totally open, in systems theory we are talking about systems which are structurally coupled with their medium when we refer to this special kind of openness. As an example, an immune system, having learned to recognise a class of virus it will remain sensitive to that and similar viruses in future. In contrast to this, imagine a fly walking over a painting of Rembrandt: Since the fly isn´t structurally coupled to the cultural space of human aesthetics it is not “open” to the beauty of Rembrandt´s work.

When we think of today´s intranets, we can see that they tend to be isolated from the world wide web, they don´t seem to perceive the internet as their medium. From a user perspective, those two systems aren´t connected to each other. Typically, when working on the intranet we jump from time to time to be in the “internet mode” and start to Google something, we copy it, jump back and paste it into the intranet. It´s the user who is the only part of the whole system connecting the internet with the intranet. Isn´t this exhausting for us?

And now I start with the good news: Intranets all over the world start to open up, slowly – but they do. It seems like the “pressure” from “the outside” just became too huge. In the first instance it seems that it´s not the data and the information which will “break” in, it´s rather the “cool functions” which web apps offer and which we (as digital natives) would like to have in our intranets too. We want:

• better search,
• more possibilities to interact with information,
• integrated views instead of jumping around,
• and we want more possibilities to self-serve our extensive hunger for more and well structured information.

On the information level intranets are still rather conservative: Typical pieces of information already “injected” from the web into an average intranet would be:

• weather forecasts,
• stock exchange rates,
• time zones and
• jokes.

How could companies use the web to inspire their employees (without opening up totally), how could the web “inject” the right amount of information into an intranet to make an enterprise portal as vivid as the web is being perceived by today´s typical end-user. How could this tremendous amount of data and knowledge on the web be “structurally” coupled with intranet repositories and workflows? What are the advantages a company could gain from publishing (at least some) data on the web?

Let me give you a few examples for intranet apps which have started to consume other information than jokes from the web:

• Enterprise Mashups: Combine CRM systems with social networks like LinkedIn
• Open innovation: Let´s bring the knowledge of consumers and producers together and improve certain products and services. As an example, just recently after BP´s oil spill more than 40.000 people came up with ideas on how to clean up  the oil, more than two dozen were deployed to help clean up the oil
• Content Augmentation: Enrich content which is being edited, let´s say in an enterprise wiki, automatically with some background knowledge from Wikipedia or with news from a news company

Finally I will also give you two examples for use cases where companies expose and publish internal data on the web (without violating privacy) and benefit from it.

• Wisdom of the crowd: The Canadian gold mining group Goldcorp made 400 megabytes of geological survey data available to the public over the Internet. They offered over $500,000 to anyone who could analyze the data and suggest places where gold could be found. The company claims that the contest produced 110 targets, 8 million ounces of gold, worth more than $3 billion.
• Prize economics: Netflix, a movie rental service in the US has published data for a contest to improve their recommender engine. One team out of 50.000 contestants after nearly 3 years has improved the existing recommender engine by more than 10% and won 1 Million dollar

To end with a conclusion: What Tim Berners-Lee has demanded in one of his famous TED talks was “raw data now!”. It has started to become reality. Just think of all the “Open Government Data Initiatives” around the globe which were initiated since then. Now companies with a “Web DNA” have started to understand the value of open data and to contribute their “5 cents” to the global “open data cloud”. I think this will not only be of value for many companies but also will increase tremendously the chances to resolve some global problems in the near future.

The idea of providing raw data (first mentioned by Sir Tim Berners Lee in the course of the W3C Linked (Open) Data movement) for free and unrestricted re-use follows the idea and objectives of the reegle.info information system as the single point of access for worldwide clean energy data (renewable energy as well as energy efficiency).

On data.reegle.info you can find data on stakeholders in the clean energy area as well as country (energy) profiles from the 1st day of the launch in November 2010 – later on the reegle.info team will open up its renewable energy and energy efficiency thesaurus (SKOS format) for public re-use and continuously will open up and provide more and more clean energy data on data.reegle.info. As license for data.reegle.info the Open Government Data License for public sector information is used. data.reegle.info follows W3C standards and recommendations for Linked Open Data as well as Open Government Data.

For developers data.reegle.info have created a comprehensive developer guide as well as a SPARQL endpoint as the central API to the reegle.info data. So the the reegle.info consortium  hopes that data.reegle.info initiates a lot of new (data) mash ups as well as innovative apps using data.reegle.info.

Show what is possible! As Martin Kaltenböck – one of the organizers oft the recently held Semantic Web Meetup on an Austrian Open Government Data Initiative – said, there is a lot of enthusiasm and energy to inform the public and engage politics about the impact a initative similar to those in US and UK may have for Austria. And the KickOff was promissing. Inspiring talks by Rufus Pollock (UK) and Stefano Bertolo (EU) where giving an insight whats possible in the specific field of Open Government Data, as well as how a start of an initiative can look like.

As ePSI-Platform wrote in their blog
The Austrian Open Data initiative is online and at work.

The event was very well attended, and brought together stakeholders from science, industry, government and citizen activists, A promising melange of people which may carry the project forward to very concrete UseCases and Trials in the very near future. As the initiative is ment to be carried by a broad group of proponents, the follow-up of the meeting will be a round table talk, of those who are willing to contribute in upcoming light-tower projects and opening concrete sets of government data for that.

The next meeting of the Austrian Open Data Initiative
takes place on the 12th May at 9.30 a.m. in
Room D, quartier 21 of the Vienna Museum Quarter.

More resources

Searching for “semantic web” in the AppStore delivers six results, one of them called “SemanticWb” is obviously an interesting match. The application “extracts current life sciences and health care knowledge and place them conveniently at your fingertips on your iPhone”. The application offers search suggestions and moderated search and retrieves articles from PubMed or genetic disorders which are related to the search term. Good start, this is a neat iPhone application which should be interesting for medical doctors and related professions.

Another application on the iPhone which is related to the semantic web is the “English wordnet dictionary” based on WordNet from Princeton University.

So, not much semantic web on the iPhone so far – I thought until Evriverse was released some weeks ago. The iPhone version of evri.com offers a new way to find connections between all kind of things. Similar to OpenCalais Evri can extract people, places, organisations, products etc. from unstructured information like news or blogs. The innovation around Evriverse is the way how complex search queries around “anything” can be formulated by just touching the screen. For example, if you are looking for information about “Tim Berners-Lee” the application not only offers auto-complete but also suggests related people, organisations etc. to refine any search query. Such relations are updated constantly and are based on the semantic analysis of news and blogs.

Evriverse offers the most comfortable way to do news research on the iPhone today. It shows how semantic technologies can enhance user experience on a mobile device and it will path the way to more semantic (web) apps on the iPhone.

That´s more than annoying for me who´s been trying for years to establish ethical aspects in my work as a journalist, as a pr-person (believe it or not!) – as a human-being. Being sensitive for the special challenges connected with discussing ethical issues in a diverse global economy I´ve always been trying to publish and talk about the philosophical approach to these matters.

Therefore I ´m happy to come across Tim Berners Lee´s request at the current International World Wide Web Conference in Madrid: Clean the web! He – which is not at all surprising – is claiming a clean web. The user has to know which data he can trust and may pass on. Also privacy must be protected he postulates one more time. All these arguments deal authentically with ethics. But not only. They concern the future. The future of us all.

According to Tim Berners-Lee the Web is still static and consists mostly of archived HTML and PDF documents. There is still a need for a read/write Web and the standards are still not used to a sufficient extend. Changes in the Web are the ‘move to mobile’ and the climb up of ‘advertizing to being a science’.

Beside the still existing challenges of the current Web, additional ones arrived. Web Applications as well as Open Social Networking and Open Linked Data count to the area of current interest.

Web Applications are supposed to become new computing platforms and need a serious clean trust system. In the future Web Applications could offer a decentralized modular installation like a webized Debian.

Open Social Networking has become a great application in the Web. Currently it suffers from the ‘Social Silo Problem’. Users have often accounts in several platforms like Facebook or MySpace. The platforms, however, are separated from each other like in a field of silos. The challenge of the Semantic Web Community is now to interconnect the silos via RDF, OWL, HTTP, and SPARQL. A further requirement of Tim Berners-Lee are to focus on a Secure Web id.

Open Linked Data attracted the attention of Tim Berners-Lee most of all. Being one of the chairs of the co-located workshop ‘Linked Data on the Web’ he stressed that “we need data on the Web to work better together” in government, enterprise, and science. Open Linked Data could be a wizard for users of existing relational database systems. As query language he proposed a federated/delegated SPARQL.

Finally, Tim Berners-Lee described the role of researchers in those challenges. Researchers should ‘build a platform for others that follow’. Thereby, one should not assume what people will use the platform for.

(Report by Christoph Wieser / Salzburg Research)

The call is still open till the end of May 2009. For more information please visit http://triplify.org/challenge

Those kind of applications should not be confused with “semantic web” end-user-applications like Google´s Wonderwheel or INTSPEI´s Cloudlet: To add some semantics to existing user-interfaces can be helpful and obviously users are ready for such experiments, but of course this is NOT the innovation which the semantic web will bring but it is a very important step to be taken in parallel with the linked data initiative.

Let´s take a look at Cloudlet: This tool is an easy-to-use free Firefox extension that adds context-sensitive tag clouds to the most popular search engines and helps people more efficiently navigate through their search results. The previous version of Search Cloudlet worked with Google and Yahoo; the new version also works with Twitter. It adds Tag Clouds, Author Clouds, Recipient Clouds and Hashtag Clouds to Twitter search, Twitter user profiles and home pages. See some reviews on this popular tool.

Cloudlet is a child of the Web. INTSPEI has learned all lessons from Web 2.0 especially how to promote ideas using the blogosphere and how to identify market trends as early as possible, and it generates some added value for the users which is obvious. Sure, it doesn´t make use of linked data yet, but as a typical representative of the fast growing “semantic search evolution” it reminds me on Chris Welty´s famous insight: “In the Semantic Web, it is not the Semantic which is new, it is the Web which is new.”

Web 1.0 was the WWW without tons of network effects. Web 2.0 changed that a lot.

Linked Data is not the Semantic Web, it´s the basement for it. From a software developer´s and an IT archictect´s perspective it might seem as those two concepts were the same. But this community represents a very small percentage of all web-users.

So where is the User´s Web in the Linked Data architecture? If you´re looking at TimBL´s Linked Data principles one can clearly see that this is a “Web” for developers.

But things evolve. And some Web companies will jump on the bandwagon and will, for instance, improve their tagclouds, their semantic search, their recommender systems (Twine?) or their similarity search a lot by making use of linked data.

Like semantic search becomes mainstream (or call it “semantic search 2.0″) right now, then (in about three years, I guess) linked data will become part of a lot of mainstream applications. Linked data will generate tons of new network effects, maybe even new business models, it won´t be avant-garde anymore. It will be part of the Semantic Web.

In recent days – here at Semantic Web Company – we have had a lot of discussions on how the future of the Semantic Web (name it Web3.0 if you like) will develop. Several stakeholders on the future of the Semantic Web see already, that also a potential danger will come along with the technical realisation of the web3.0: This is the present possibility to create applications and mashups with semantic technologies that are a real drain on privacy and information ethics. Without an underpinning discussion about the ethical framework within technolgies like linked data, text-mining, biometric-systems and geo-systems in combination with the web of data, the whole domain is in danger to be doomed like genetic engineering some years ago.

It’s crucial for the public opinion on the Semantic Web, to adress the immanent risks regarding privacy and ethics. In this context I’ll see also Tim Berners-Lee‘s statement yesterday: “W3C wants to help make sure data use is appropriate,” he said. Berners-Lee, who is director of W3C, said in an interview on Wednesday that the teams working on the Semantic Web project are making sure that privacy principles are included in its architecture: “The Semantic Web project is developing systems which will answer where data came from and where it’s going to — the system will be architectured for a set of appropriate uses.”

Maybe it’s an important step in keeping the further development of Semantic Web trusty in the eyes of public opinion, that the W3C has privacy and information ethics on their agenda and persons like Berners-Lee stand with their reputation for it. But it is also crucial to build this awareness on the corporate side. Only if everyone within the domain follows a common ethic understanding we have a public opinion, which is on the future potential of the Semantic Web, and not in fear of the same.

But not only the quantity of attendees, also the high quality of talks and discussions which are going on at this first conference on the “commercialization of the web of Linked Data” show that we are facing a fast growing phenomenon with a “great momentum” as Berners-Lee stated.

Kingsley Idehen from OpenLink Software started the first day of the conference with his keynote in which he tried to “demystify” the term Linked Data. He said that “Linked Data is the foundation of the semantic web, its connectivity is growing and the line between enterprise and individual level is blurring”. He also stressed the similarities between ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity) and Linked Data – which might be interesting for my next talk with an “old-fashioned” CTO.

Uche Ogbuji from Zepheira referred to DBpedia as “the star” of the Linked Data Cloud and gave an interesting talk about the possibilities of Linking Enterprise Data.

Tim Berners-Lee listed in his keynote the areas in which the LOD-community is now facing the biggest challenges:

• standards, for instance levels of inference, link following on linked data clients and servers
• federated query; query service descriptions
• ultimate human interface to all the data there are
• balancing diversity & harmony in ontology development
• and, of course, continuing the great momentum

Tim Berners-Lee also emphasised that hiding information in some cases like product information is “just crazy”. One way to expand the LOD cloud could be “lobbying” for data sources (with governments, providers of commercial information, etc).

Between the talks people spent their time in the exhibition area. Dean Allemang from TopQuadrant gave a demo of TopBraid Composer. I talked to Tom Tague from OpenCalais about the new features the next releases will have and how to use their service behind the firewall and Mike Bergman from Zitgist showed me the power of UMBEL web services.

All in all – LinkedData Planet is a great community event, well organised and well populated by people who want to use the semantic web in different commercial settings.

And to those who weren’t able to attend: I recommend to take a look at the Linked Data Shopping List, a page within the Linked Data Initiative’s wiki where you can add the data that you want to see published as Linked Data.

Read also pt. 2 of our conference report: The social hub @ LinkedData Planet 2008

[Image: official-ly cool]