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November 13, 2006

Updated: Web 3.0? 'Macaca' speaks; Transparent butterfly

I've updated this with some feedback from other bloggers furthering the idea. Scroll down to "Update" if you read this yesterday, "Updated again" if you read it today.

Astronaut Bowman as he appears in the "eye" of the renegade computer HAL 9000, in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The "Semantic Web" does not mean machines that think.

Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense: John Markoff of the Times tries to explain the next-gen Semantic Web, on which he plants the moniker Web 3.0. (Web 2.0 is mashups like my R.I. Beaches map, but futurists foresee many possible Web 3.0s.) From the story,

Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.

Yes, Google delivers dumb keyword results that don't distinguish between cordon bleu as a chicken or veal recipe, on a menu, the cooking school or a restaurant's name, but I think it's a stretch to call the next step adding "meaning" to it all. That's HAL. There's better filtering and weighting, but trip planning -- the example given -- seems to miss the mark:

...the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.”

Under today’s system, such a query can lead to hours of sifting — through lists of flights, hotel, car rentals — and the options are often at odds with one another. Under Web 3.0, the same search would ideally call up a complete vacation package that was planned as meticulously as if it had been assembled by a human travel agent.

The original question would seem to yield thousands of results -- every decent Southern U.S., Central American and Caribbean hotel. You could go to Orbitz now and click on Beach in the Explore section and pick a place. "Cheapest fares" comes from simply churning the data.

Trip reports filed by humans who've been there are still the best way to pick a vacation spot. While "spotless" may be findable by this software, you might not think to specify that you like swim-up bars or really dislike phony culture shows. But if you read someone raving about local bands playing every night across the street from a Jamaican resort, or discover that your favorite band is playing the resort circuit in Playa del Carmen that week, that intangible may make your decision for you. It's hard to quantify, anticipate and code for.

The Semantic Web is different from this "collaborative filtering" -- the wisdom of the crowd, or at least those generous enough to contribute to the lore.

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web and pathfinder on this project, was co-author of a 2001 Scientific American article, The Semantic Web, that begins easy and goes as deep as you can hang in. It starts with a fictional scenario of a brother and sister planning their mother's medical treatment, with computer agents automatically sifting appointment times and covered providers to suggest a plan. Brother doesn't like the traffic between him and the chosen hospital, so he sets stricter location limits and has the computer redo the plan.

Then, the explanation:

The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users. Such an agent coming to the clinic's Web page will know not just that the page has keywords such as "treatment, medicine, physical, therapy" (as might be encoded today) but also that Dr. Hartman works at this clinic on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and that the script takes a date range in yyyy-mm-dd format and returns appointment times. And it will "know" all this without needing artificial intelligence on the scale of 2001's Hal or Star Wars's C-3PO. Instead these semantics were encoded into the Web page when the clinic's office manager (who never took Comp Sci 101) massaged it into shape using off-the-shelf software for writing Semantic Web pages along with resources listed on the Physical Therapy Association's site.

The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. The first steps in weaving the Semantic Web into the structure of the existing Web are already under way. In the near future, these developments will usher in significant new functionality as machines become much better able to process and "understand" the data that they merely display at present.

Real world: When restaurants are online in realtime (yet to happen), my computer could display Providence restaurants serving cordon bleu tonight at what prices, ask me to choose one (around when?) then make a reservation, reserve a portion of chicken cordon bleu for me, and notify the restaurant's computer if I'm hung up in traffic. It will not think about chicken cordon bleu. Its mouth will not water.

And -- being my agent -- it will not suggest I've had enough calories already today and should have salad instead.

Bonus: The HAL transcripts.

Update: A couple of bloggers more tech-savvy than me address this post, and further it.

Programmer and tech author Shelley Powers, On Meaning:

What most people want (from the Semantic Web) is what Sheila is describing: systems that work together seamlessly; that integrate immediately; that help us do something we couldn't do before.

...I find it interesting, though, to see these writings about the web of meaning now, when I've finally reached a personal epiphany that as cool as this stuff is, it has about as much practical use as a Slinky.

Anne 2.0 (Anne Zelenka): It’s Not Meaning We Need, But Action: An Existentialist Approach to Web 3.0:

Sheila Lennon points out where this morning’s NY Times article got it wrong. It’s not about meaning. It’s about software agents who can do our bidding and remove some of the friction from managing our days...

...Existentialists don’t get themselves hung up on the objective truth or the ultimate meaning of life. What makes meaning is being in the world, taking action....

Earlier David Weinberger (The Semantic Argument Web) explained why it's impractical to expect the Semantic Web concept to get much further than better searching:

For example, if we had a schema for expressing contact information, the Semantic Web would enable us to search for web pages where the metadata attribute "last_name" has the content "Bush" and it would find all the Bush relatives without finding a single page about rhododendra.

Even if you and I don't know precisely what a schema is, I get that this solves the Google problem: All the cordon bleu pages would have an extra term readable by a search engine that would indicate "recipe" or "restaurant" or "cooking school" -- terms I could have included in my search query.

And that's the rub, why the fully realized Semantic Web is practically impossible: It's too labor intensive and tedious to add this metadata -- descriptive data about the data -- to every page and every bit of information on it.

But you can expect a system that's already monitoring restaurant tables and how many orders of cordon bleu are in the inventory to respond to my computer's input:

It's not "meaning" -- it's literally "message" and the message is very simple. "Ordering one, Harry."

The Main Menu screen for Sixth Sense Cafe restaurant software. (I have no idea whether this software could participate in any of this. It's here to illustrate, an example of what's already in use.)

Later: Is this all there is? The Semantic Web can't be just automation.

Shelley notes its resemblance to a Slinky -- no practical use. But I'm up for impractical uses. Shelley's "web of meaning" sounds really good.

Updated again: Marketing/PR pro Jeneane Sessum leaps in with Web 3.0, Google Docs and Spreadsheets as E-Room Killer, and Giving Thanks. And she's definitely leaping. Backing in,

Enter Google, barely making a sound, but unleashing the most simple and powerful document collaboration platform -- for FREE -- with google docs and spreadsheets. I was blown away when I started using it just last week. You can collaborate with others, including your clients, real time, inside of documents (uploaded word documents, excel spreadsheets and others), in a shared space. You can administer editing and viewing rights. You can export and import to common file formats. You can even subscribe to docs via RSS to track changes! I mean HOLY CRAP. All of these years I've been begging for this, and Google tosses it out there like a crouton atop a luscious salad.

And how did Google develop it? Through web 2.0 acquisitions and software innovations. What have they created with those things? A web 3.0 collaborative nexus.

If John Markoff found Web 3.0 in a travel agency, Jeneane has wrenched the term away from him and relocated it to a networked space:

Remember the people you have met--people you've always thought, "Damn, I wish I could work with her," and understand that you can, we are, and that is a very very very cool thing.

With four women now in this conversation, it only makes sense that Jeneane has crossposted this to BlogHer, as Web 3.0 and the Networked Worker: Creating a Work FORCE.

I had wondered if Web 3.0 might have a jobs component. I'd like to see that build out.

Accidental catalyst: S.R. Sidarth: I Am Macaca. The second-generation American who was welcomed to America by George Allen offers some context. Earlier WaPo profile: Fairfax Native Says Allen's Words Stung.

Frank Rich, NYT: 2006: The Year of the ‘Macaca’: Brilliant and hopeful. Too bad they lock these folks up. It doesn't make me want to pay Times Select to be among the elite who read them regularly, just makes me sad that the Times keeps them out of the hoi polloi's linkage and conversation.

The macaca incident had resonance beyond Virginia not just because it was a hit on YouTube. It came to stand for 2006 as a whole because it was synergistic with a national Republican campaign that made a fetish of warning that a Congress run by Democrats would have committee chairmen who are black (Charles Rangel) or gay (Barney Frank), and a middle-aged woman not in the Stepford mold of Laura Bush as speaker. In this context, Mr. Allen’s defeat was poetic justice: the perfect epitaph for an era in which Mr. Rove systematically exploited the narrowest prejudices of the Republican base, pitting Americans of differing identities in cockfights for power and profit, all in the name of “faith.”...

What a week this was! Here’s to the voters of both parties who drove a stake into the heart of our political darkness. If you’ll forgive me for paraphrasing George Allen: Welcome back, everyone, to the world of real America.

Sheer gossamer: Glasswing Butterfly: Its wings are transparent. More photos at the link.

Rah, maybe: Usually the hometown sportswriters drum up a little drama before a game against the Patriots (except in Buffalo, where they expect little), but the coverage of today's Jets game is flaccid.

The Jets haven't beaten the Patriots since December 2002, which makes writing about it a stretch. But the Daily News turns in the best of the bunch, while predicting a score of Pats 28, Jets 13: Is this the end?

Update: Flaccid Patriots. Jets win. Bring back Deion Branch, at any price. Please.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 2:19 PM | Permalink