International Semantic Web Conference 2006 (ISWC 2006), Athens (GA), USA - Day 3

Thursday, the last day of ISWC started with a keynote of Rudi Studer from the University of Karlsruhe on 'The Semantic Web: Suppliers and Customers'. He drew the historic connection from databases to the Semantic web as being a web of human-readable content connected to machine-interpretable semantic resources. He also pointed out the importance of interdisciplinary research for realizing the Semantic Web, while on the other hand, the Semantic Web also contributes to other disciplines and comunities. After that I was listening to an interesting talk of Andreas Harth from DERI on 'Crawling and Indexing the Semantic Web', where he introduced an architecture for a semantic web crawler and gave some first results.
The most interesting talk of the day was the talk of Ivan Herman from W3C (here you can find his foaf data) on 'Semantic Web @ W3C: Activities, Recommendations and State of Adoption'. He proposed 2007 to be the 'year of rules', because finally, we might come to a recommendation concerning rule languages for the Semantic Web. He also mentioned the efforts of integrating RDF data into XHTML via RDFa or - vice versa - to get RDF data out of XHTML with GRDDL.
The ISWC closed with the announcement of the best paper awards and the winners of theis year's semantic web challenge.
If you are interested in the conference, you might have a look at the video recordings of the talks.

International Semantic Web Conference 2006 (ISWC 2006), Athens (GA), USA - Day 2

Wednesday...the 2nd day of ISWC started with a keynote of Jane E. Fountain from the University of Massachussetts in Amherst about 'The Semantic Web and Networked Governance'. From her point of view, Governements have to be considered as major information processing [and knowledge creating] entities in the world, and she was trying topoint out the key challenges faced by governements in a networked world (for me the topic was not that interesting...). Also today's sessions - at least those that I have attended - were not that exciting. I liked one presentation given by Natasha Noy from Stanford on 'A Framework for Ontology Evolution in Collaborative Environments' in the 'Collaboration and Cooperation' session. She presented an extension of the protégé ontology editor for collaborative ontology development.
The most interesting session for me was the 'Web 2.0' panel in the afternoon. Amon the panelist were Prof. Jürgen Angele (Ontoprise), Dave Beckett (Yahoo!), Sir Tim Berners-Lee (W3C), Prof. Benjamin Grosof (MIT Sloane School of Management), and Tom Gruber. The panelwas discussing the role of semantic web technology for web 2.0 applications.

Jürgen Angele pointed out that the only thing that is really new about web 2.0 is ad-hoc remixability. Everything else is nothing but 'old' technology. But, as he stated, web 2.0 could be a driving force for semantic web technology.

Dave Beckett made some advertising for Yahoo! in the sense that he was pointing out that Yahoo! indeed is making use of semantic web technology (at least in their new system called Yahoo!Food) and Yahoo! is a great participation platform with more than 500 million visitors per month.

Tim Berners-Lee gave a survey on the flaws and drawbacks of web 2.0 and how semantic web technology could help. While web 2.0 is not able to provide real inter-application integration, the semantic web on the other side does not provide such cool interfaces to data. Together both in combination, they could become interesting.
All so called new aspects of web 2.0 have already been the goals of the original web (1.0), as easy creation of content, collaborative spaces, intercreativity, collective intelligence from designing together, creating relationships, reuse of information, and of course user-generated content. Web 2.0 architecture consists of client side (AJAX) interaction and server side data processing (aka the good old 'client-server'-paradigm) and mashups (one per application / each needs coding in javascript, each needs scraping/converting/...). Essentially, web 2.0 is fully centralized. So, why are skype, del.icio.us, or flickr websites instead of protocols (as foaf is)? The reuse of web 2.0 data is only limited to the hostside. Only with the help of feeds, data are able to break out from centralized sites. What will happen with all of your tags? Will they end up as simply being words or will they become real (and usefull) URIs?
With semantic web technology, web 2.0 enables multiple identities for you. You may have many URIs, enabling you to access different sorts of data, to fullfill different expectations concerning trust, accuracy, and persistence. In the end, web 2.0 and semantic web while being good seperately could be great together!

Benjamin Grosof asked, where semantic web technology could help web 2.0. He focused on backend semantic integration and mediation (augment your information via shallow inferences), collaboration and semantic search. Semantic search will enable you a morhuman centered search interface, as e.g., 'Give me all recipes of cake....but I don't like any fruits' and 'I want a good recommendation from a well reputed web site'. He sees semantic web technology piggyback on web 2.0 interactions ('web 2.0 = search for terrestrial intelligence in the crowd' :) The semantic web should exploit web 2.0 to obtain knowledge.

Tom Gruber was asking 'Where is the mojo in Web 2.0?'. He characterized web 2.0 as being a fundamentally democratic architecture, driven by social and entertainment payoffs (universal appeal...), while the web 1.0 business model actually keeps working ('attention economy'). He was discussing the way from today's 'collected intelligence' to real 'collective intelligence'. He concluded 'don't ask what the web knows....ask what the world knows!' and 'don't make the web smart...make the world smart'.

International Semantic Web Conference 2006 (ISWC 2006), Athens (GA), USA - Day 1

Tuesday morning 9 a.m. ... the ISWC 2006 starts with the keynote of Tom Gruber (godfather of computer science based definition of the term 'ontology') on 'Where the Social Web Meets the Semantic Web'. He focused on 'Collective Intelligence' as being the reason that companies as google or amazon did survive the first Dot-com bubble, because they where making use of their users' collective knowledge. Google uses other people's intelligence by computing a page rank out of the users' links to other webpages. Amazon uses the people's choices for their recommentation system, and ebay uses the people's reputation. Interesting thing about that is that the notion of 'Collective Intelligence' (aka 'Social Web', aka 'Web 2.0') - was already addressed by Douglas Engelbart in the late 60's. Engelbart did not only invent the mouse, the window-based user interface, and many other important things that are part of today's computing environment, his driving force - as Gruber said - was 'Collective Intelligence'....to cope with the set of growing problems that humanity is facing today. Thus - as I have also stated in another post - also the semantic web depends on collaboration and participation of the users and therfore, on 'Collective Intelligence' to become a success.

BTW, I prefer using the term 'Social Web' instead of 'Web 2.0'. From my point of view 'Social Web' hits exactly the point and does not suggest any new and exciting technology (but only the fact that people are using existing web technology in a collaborative way to interact with each other).

After the keynote I visited the 'Knowledge Representation' session with an interesting talk of Sören Auer on OntoWiki (a semantic wiki system .. interesting, because one of my students is alsoimplementing a semantic wiki). In the afternoon sessions I esp. liked the talks about representation and visualization (esp. the talk of Eyal Oren on 'Extending faceted navigation for RDF data', where he presented a nice server application that is able to visualize arbitrary RDF-data). In the evening, a dinner buffet (including cuban music) was combined with the poster sessions and the 'Semantic Web Challenge' exhibition, where I found the possibility for a cooperation with Siegfried Handschuh from DERI (on semantic authoring and annotation....).

Oh...I already forgot to mention that there is also a flickr group with ISWC photographs...