Infovark

We arrived here in Boston tired, and pretty scruffy looking after the red-eye train from DC. But, we made it!

We just missed an interesting sounding opening presentation from Rob Carter from FedEx - it looks like FedEx are making extensive use of the web, facebook and blogs and wikis both within and external to their organization.

Sean Dennehy and Don Burke then presented a great seession on their work at the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA’s knowledge sharing ability has been greatly enhanced since they deployed their “intellipedia” - a mediawiki implementation that allows CIA staff to edit and share information freely, and without editorial regulation.

My favourite quote from Sean - “Wikis don’t work in theory - they only work in practice”

Other than removing the ability to make anonymous edits, not much was changed by the CIA when they launched intellipedia, last year.  They claim also to have a much higher contribution rate (Wikipedia has a markedly low percentage of users who actually edit it - often guessed at about 1-3%) - but they are still working with the early adopters - intellipedia hasn’t been wholly rolled out to the entire organization.

“A culture problem - not a technology problem”

Don mentioned that there was substantial resistance to their efforts to incorporate this crazy wiki thing into their business. Primary benefit comes from working at the broadest audience possible. The wiki approach also focuses more on topic than on organizational structure - it means that the point tends to be on content, rather than process. That’s a really good thing.

” But - I don’t have time to edit this intellipedia thing”

Don and Sean seem adamant that the best way to deal with this kind of response is for people to stop writing emails and documents, and start writing intellipedia articles instead. (I suspect that that’s going to be a friction point for them. People don’t like new ideas very much. )

All in all, this was a great session - intellipedia seems set to be a great success.

April Fools Day has come and gone, and the Internet has largely returned to normal.

Yeah, the gags are pretty annoying. But they’re also kind of fun, right?

Yesterday’s antics led Dean to point out that April Fools Day would freak out the semantic web and emerging services based on it, like Calais and Twine.

As an example, out of no other reason than pure mischief, I mailed some of my friends a link to a video which I claimed was a leaked internal video analysis of HP’s recent acquisition of our former employer, TOWER Software. In my email, I harped on at length about some completely made up rubbish about strategy and future direction. Of course, the accompanying link was, in fact, to this video.

I know, I’m terribly original and downright hilarious, but back to the point:

Without the April Fool’s Day context, a careful semantic analysis of my emailed rickroll might permanently associate HP, TOWER Software, Strategy and Bad 80’s pop music. Or it might indicate that I was related to HP in some way (which I’m not). Regardless of how effective or capable any semantic engine is, any meaning that could possibly be extracted from my joke would be largely false, with the possible exception of the close — but now perhaps a bit strained — relationships between me and my friends.

No amount of metadata, microformats or markup can save the computers from human exaggeration, humor, or outright lies. And we humans have institutionalized a day where that’s all we do.

Apparently, Gordon and I are behind the times. While we’ve been caught up in a discussion of Enterprise 2.0, ReadWriteWeb reports that the folks at Project10x have already mapped out the landscape for Web 3.0 and Web 4.0. Gosh, that’s embarrassing.

It’s almost as embarrassing as if we just uttered the phrase “Black is the new black” when “X is the new Y” jokes are as yesterday as “that’s so yesterday” jokes.

I’d like to see what a Web 3.0 semantic parsing engine would make of that last sentence. I doubt a linguistics program would come close to understanding what I meant by it. Even us humans have trouble seeing sarcasm in print sometimes. And that’s only one of the reasons why I’m skeptical of the semantic web concept.

Chief among those reasons is the notion that we ought to change the world wide web such that every URL comes with a list of ontologically correct statements that describe the related content in a structured way so that computers can draw meaningful inferences from it.

See, the semantic web is easy! What? Oh, OK, I’ll pause here while you look up the word ontology.

Still not enlightened? Well, here’s the basic idea: The Internet contains a wealth of information. Humans use this data in all sorts of interesting ways for a bewildering array of different uses. At times, though, all that searching and skimming we do can get a little tedious. Wouldn’t it be great if you had a little robot (excuse me, an intelligent agent) that could surf the web for you and assemble all the information you needed? All we’d need to do is restructure all of our messy webpages into a consistent, logical format, build a parsing tool able to read, relate, and understand the information, and construct an artificial intelligence that can apply this knowledge in the context of your daily life. No problem. The scientific community will wrap that up sometime after they finish working on Cold Fusion, perpetual motion, and that personal jetpack they promised me.

I think there are three faulty premises at work here:

1. The majority of us humans are willing to adjust our habits to accommodate our computer tools. If the history of design is any guide, it is the tools that adjust to conform to human habits, not the other way around. We’re not about to redo all the pages on the Internet just so our computers can do a little surfing in their downtime. While certain high-value datasets will incorporate the technologies of the semantic web — RDF, OWL, SPARQL, etc. — the vast majority of pages on the Internet will be plain old human-readable text. Despite considerable investment in the well-understood technologies of relational databases and document management, it’s unstructured information that’s outstripping the structured kind in today’s enterprises.

2. The Web 2.0 revolution was about technology. It wasn’t. The technical ability to blog, to comment on articles, to participate in a social network, to join a discussion forum, and to contribute to wikis, were all secondary to our human desire to communicate and collaborate with other folks. Web 2.0 provided new and interesting ways for people to interact with other people. The semantic web promises new ways for computers to interact with other computers, or, at best, new ways for people to interact with computers. Those interactions might be interesting to us academics, technophiles, and geeks, but I doubt the general public will find them terribly engaging.

3. You can have human intelligence without being human. I’m a fan of Issac Asimov. I’d like to believe that, one day, we can build a machine that can simulate the reasoning ability of the human mind. But I’m also a fan of Douglas Adams, so I believe that any thing we build that thinks like us would also exhibit all of our emotions, idiosyncrasies, and eccentricities. And for all the time, trouble, and expense it would take to create such a machine, creating and training another human would be much easier (and more fun).

Don’t get me wrong; I think that a semantic web could have real benefits. But does it have the potential to be as game-changing as Web 2.0? I think I’d defer to HAL 9000 for the answer:

“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

Radar Networks has announced their “first mainstream semantic web application”, called Twine. It looks to be an intriguing blend of some of the elements of wikipedia, facebook, and a sprinkle of digg and del.icio.us thrown in for good measure. You can see some screenshots, and get a better overview over on readwriteweb. (Twine is currently pre-beta)

It’s a hosted service, that allows for people to create semantic structured web content around themes and topics, called twines. (In some ways, it reminds me of squidoo, too.)

I’m not going to stick my head in the flamebox that is “the semantic web”(because I know Dean is working on that post), but I will say that I really like the way that twine is shaping up to manage relationships with entities other than people. If the semantic web can deliver this in a meaningful way, I think we’ll all be a bit happier.

(But the “Web 3.0″ moniker makes me cringe. I can’t help it. And I’m all about the buzzwords, too…)