Web 3.0 conference Santa Clara, California, Part 2
I attended the Web3.0 conference last month in Santa Clara. The conference was truly inspiring, but web 3.0? One of the first questions you have to ask is “Does web 3.0 mean the semantic web?” Should we view the semantic web as a world wide database, as suggested by Dr. Mark Greaves of Vulcan, and what issues will it raise?
How cumbersome will working with numerous database administrators be? If it is a database, it will certainly be the largest - and noisiest - database in the world. This so-called noise is a big problem for the semantic web.
Another problem is that for many topics there is a vast surplus of information available - how do you find out the richest links? On the other hand, it is democratic, crowdsourced, scalable knowledge engineering, which makes the semantic web a great knowledge base for humanity.
Freshness has always been important for search and over the last months ‘live-search’ has become very popular. Due to the popularity of social media sites like Twitter, search engines have had to go hyper-fresh. People are creating a constant stream of new input, which can contain very useful and especially up-to-date information. But these hyper-fresh content services are creating new problems for search engines. Tweets aren’t always written in English and there are only 140 characters available to broadcast your message. Because there are only 140 characters, semantic technology can be quite helpful in extracting the true meaning of a message. Through semantic technology it’s possible to detect entities that are referenced and disambiguate them.
Search engines like Bing (Microsoft) are already implementing semantic technology for extracting information. “All search engines are somewhat semantic already” according to Scott Prevost, Principal Development Manager for Bing. Whatever the real definition for semantic search is, “it’s already here but it hasn’t been a ‘Voila!’ moment. Semantic search won’t be a big revolution from a new startup, but there will be game changers”. Scott has had first hand experience here with Powerset, often called “The New Google” in the media before their acquisition by Microsoft in 2008 as a feature for their search technology.
Semantic technology, like all technology, needs a certain critical mass. The good thing is that the ecosystem is growing at the moment, with more and more publishers helping out. But the main focus of semantic tech companies should be on creating systems which can automatically promote open content, so we won’t be dependent on the efforts of publishers. By creating this kind of technology the costs of semantic publishing will shrink to almost zero in several years, just as online publishing did during the web 2.0 era.
The technology is here now - there are already more than 1600 APIs and they are growing at a non-linear accelerated rate. People are starting to work in the cloud as the new data center and it is the illusion of infinite scalability and omniscience that serve as inducements. Tom Gruber, a recognized expert in Artificial Intelligence, intelligent interfaces, semantic technologies, and presenter at Web3.0, strongly believes in the “Gigantic Join” which he thinks web 3.0 will become. The semantic web will include the possibility of numerous “joins” of APIs, and his latest product Siri.com is built on this idea. Siri is a mobile device-based question and answer application using speech as input, and is built on a collection of available APIs.
This application is a good example for the upcoming mobile web, which is creating new rules, and possibilities for the semantic web. Mobile devices create new sources of input - users don’t speak in keywords, they ask questions in their native language. These new ways of input have to be interpreted, and that’s where semantic technology kicks in. “Semantic technology is the hottest area of web architecture right now,” according to Dr. Greaves. “It’s a new way of thinking about the web as we know it” says Scott Prevost.
You could indeed feel this vibe at web 3.0. People are eager to learn from each other, sharing thoughts and inspiring each other. In the coming weeks I will dig deeper into some of the Web3.0 topics related to semantic technology like SEO, search and business and opportunities.
Tweets @web3.0 conference, Santa Clara
“The Semantic Web is great, new way of thinking about the web, ai people meet publishers”
Scott Prevost (Bing/Microsoft), Computational Linguist at stage. Founder Powerset. The dimensions of search
What is semantic search? More relevant results, but what is relevant? All searchengines today are already in someway semantic
Web 3.0 conference Santa Clara, California
From 23 january till 2 february I’ll be in San Francisco / Silicon Valley to attend the Web 3.0 conference.
Ten is the start of a new decade and the third decade for the Web. The third decade is often seen as and referred to the decade of the semantic Web. So I think that it’s a great way to start this new decade in 2010 by attending the Web 3.0 conference deep in the the heart of the information technology forest - Silicon Valley.
European Semantic Technology Conference 2009
From 1 till 4 december I’ll be in Vienna for the European Semantic Technology Conference 2009 http://www.estc2009.com/
James Turrell, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
The Wolfsburg Ganzfeld Piece – as this work of art has been named – is the largest installation ever implemented by the American artist in a museum. Encompassing an area of 700 square metres and 12 meters in height, the installation comprises two rooms that merge into each other, called Viewing Space and Sensing Space, both completely empty and flooded with coloured light that keeps slowly changing. Zumtobel provided the LED luminaires and projectors used in this exhibition.
From 24 October, visitors entering these rooms will experience unique sensory perceptions in this homogeneous visual field. While the light manifests itself, referring to nothing but itself, an interplay between surfaces, colours and space is produced, creating an atmosphere that completely encloses the audience and their senses. Viewers plunge into a mysterious, yet scenic world made of pure light. The artist himself calls this experience “feeling with one’s eyes”.
The culmination of the life’s work of James Turrell, who was born in Los Angeles in 1943 and is today considered one of the most important contemporary artists, is the Roden Crater, an extinct volcano situated in the desert of Arizona, which he has been turning into an artistic observatory since 1974. The Wolfsburg Project installed at the Art Museum relates to this cosmic “light observatory”, virtually turning the Roden Crater – which opens up towards the sky – inside out, as it were, thus creating an infinite interior space. For this extravagant installation, state-of-the-art lighting technology is being used, and the artist makes full use of all opportunities the building offers, which are unprecedented in Germany’s museum landscape. The Wolfsburg Project incorporating the Ganzfeld Piece as well as supplemental installations and documentations is the US artist’s largest exhibition ever shown in Germany.
The installation will be on display in Wolfsburg until 5 April 2010. The exhibition at the Art Museum will be accompanied by a large number of side events such as discussions with architects, among others.
Papers: “Autotagging Facebook: Social Network Context Improves Photo Annotation.”
Great paper by: Zak Stone, Todd Zickler, and Trevor Darrell, “Autotagging Facebook: Social Network Context Improves Photo Annotation.” First IEEE Workshop on Internet Vision, 2008. (Best Paper Award.) [PDF]
Abstract
“Most personal photos that are shared online are embedded in some form of social network, and these social networks are a potent source of contextual information that can be leveraged for automatic image understanding. In this paper, we investigate the utility of social network context for the task of automatic face recognition in personal photographs. We combine face recognition scores with social context in a conditional random field (CRF) model and apply this model to label faces in photos from the popular online social network Facebook, which is now the top photo-sharing site on the Web with billions of photos in total. We demonstrate that our simple method of enhancing face recognition with social network context substantially increases recognition performance beyond that of a baseline face recognition system. ” [PDF]
