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Help the People of Burma -- Post this Meme on Your Blog!

Note: This is a new kind of online protest that uses blogs to spread a petition globally. To participate, just add your blog by following the instructions in this blog post.

This not an issue of partisan politics, this is an issue of basic human rights and democracy. Please help to prevent a human tragedy in Burma by adding your blog and asking others to do the same.

By passing this meme on through the blogosphere hopefully we can generate more awareness and avert a serious tragedy. As concerned world-citizens this something we bloggers can do to help.

How to participate:

1. Copy this entire post to your blog, including this special number: 1081081081234

2. After a few days, you can search Google for the number 1081081081234 to find all blogs that are participating in this protest and petition. Note: Google indexes blogs at different rates, so it could take longer for your blog to show up in the results. Also note -- if you want an accurate count of the number of blogs that joined this petition, make sure you scroll to the bottom of the Google results and click to view results that were omitted because they were similar.

3. If you know how to add tags to your blog posts, add the Technorati tag 1081081081234 to your post as well. This will make your post findable sooner in Technorati.

THE SITUATION IN BURMA AND WHY IT MATTERS TO ALL OF US

There is no press freedom in Burma and the government has started turning off the Internet and other means of communication, so it is difficult to get news out. Individuals on the ground have been sending their day-by-day reports to the BBC, and they are heartbreaking. I encourage you to read these accounts to see for yourself what is really going on in Burma. Please include this link in your own blog post.

The situation in Burma is increasingly dangerous. Hundreds of thousands of unarmed peaceful protesters, including monks and nuns, are risking their lives to march for democracy against an unpopular but well-armed military dictatorship that will stop at nothing to continue its repressive rule. While the generals in power and their families are literally dripping in gold and diamonds, the people of Burma are impoverished, deprived of basic human rights, cut off from the rest of the world, and increasingly under threat of violence.

This week the people of Burma have risen up collectively in the largest public demonstrations against the ruling Junta in decades. It's an amazing show of bravery, decency, and democracy in action. But although these protests are peaceful, the military rulers are starting to crack down with violence. Already there have been at least several reported deaths, and hundreds of critical injuries from soldiers beating unarmed civilians to the point of death.

The actual fatalities and injuries are probably far worse, but the only news we have is coming from individuals who are sneaking reports past the authorities. Unfortunately it looks like a large-scale blood-bath may ensue -- and the victims will be mostly women, children, the elderly and unarmed monks and nuns.

Contrary to what the Burmese, Chinese and Russian governments have stated, this is not merely a local internal political issue, it is an issue of global importance and it affects the global community. As concerned citizens, we cannot allow any government anywhere in the world to use its military to attack and kill peacefully demonstrating, unarmed citizens.

In this modern day and age violence against unarmed civilians is unacceptable and if it is allowed to happen, without serious consequences for the perpetrators, it creates a precedent for it to happen again somewhere else. If we want a more peaceful world, it is up to each of us to make a personal stand on these fundamental issues whenever they arise.

Please join me in calling on the Burmese government to negotiate peacefully with its citizens, and on China to intervene to prevent further violence. And please help to raise awareness of the developing situation in Burma so that hopefully we can avert a large-scale human disaster there.

Gartner is Wrong about Web 3.0

I have a lot of respect for the folks at Gartner, but their recent report in which they support the term "Web 2.0" yet claim that the term "Web 3.0" is just a marketing ploy, is a bit misguided.

In fact, quite the opposite is true.

The term Web 2.0 is in fact just a marketing ploy. It has only come to have something resembling a definition over time. Because it is in fact so ill-defined, I've suggested in the past that we just use it to refer to a decade: the second decade of the Web (2000 - 2010). After all there is no actual technology that is called "Web 2.0" -- at best there are a whole slew of things which this term seems to label, and many of them are design patterns, not technologies. For example "tagging" is not a technology, it is a design pattern. A tag is a keyword, a string of text -- there is not really any new technology there. AJAX is also not a technology in its own right, but rather a combination of technologies and design patterns, most of which existed individually before the onset of what is called Web 2.0.

In contrast, the term Web 3.0 actually does refer to a set of new technologies, and changes they will usher in during the third decade of the Web (2010 - 2020). Chief among these is the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is actually not one technology, but many. Some of them such as RDF and OWL have been under development for years, even during the Web 2.0 era, and others such as SPARQL and GRDDL are recent emerging standards. But that is just the beginning. As the Semantic Web develops there will be several new technology pieces added to the puzzle for reasoning, developing and sharing open rule definitions, handling issues around trust, agents, machine learning, ontology development and integration, semantic data storage, retrieval and search, and many other subjects.

Essentially, the Semantic Web enables the gradual transformation of the Web into a database. This is a profound structural change that will touch every layer of Web technology eventually. It will transform database technology, CMS, CRM, enterprise middleware, systems integration, development tools, search engines, groupware, supply-chain integration, and all the other topics that Gartner covers.

The Semantic Web will manifest in several ways. In many cases it will improve applications and services we already use. So for example, we will see semantic social networks, semantic search, semantic groupware, semantic CMS, semantic CRM, semantic email, and many other semantic versions of apps we use today. For a specific example, take social networking. We are seeing much talk about "opening  up the social graph" so that social networks are more connected and portable. Ultimately to do this right, the social graph should be represented using Semantic Web standards, so that it truly is not only open but also easily extensible and mashable with other data. 

Web 3.0 is not ONLY the Semantic Web however. Other emerging technologies may play a big role as well. Gartner seems to think Virtual Reality will be one of them. Perhaps, but to be fair, VR is actually a Web 1.0 phenomenon. It's been around for a long time, and it hasn't really changed that much. In fact the folks at the MIT Media Lab were working on things that are still far ahead of Second Life, even back in the early 1990's.

So what other technologies can we expect in Web 3.0 that are actually new? I expect that we will have a big rise in "cloud computing" such as open peer-to-peer grid storage and computing capabilities on the Web -- giving any application essentially as much storage and computational power as needed for free or a very low cost. In the mobile arena we will see higher bandwidth, more storage and more powerful processors in mobile devices, as well as powerful built-in speech recognition, GPS and motion sensors enabling new uses to emerge. I think we will also see an increase in the power of personalization tools and personal assistant tools that try to help users manage the complexity of their digital lives. In the search arena, we will see search engines get smarter -- among other things they will start to not only answer questions, but they will accept commands such as "find me a cheap flight to NYC" and they will learn and improve as they are used. We will also see big improvements in integration and data and account portability between different Web applications. We will also see a fundamental change in the database world as databases move away from the relational model and object model, towards the associative model of data (graph databases and triplestores).

In short, Web 3.0 is about hard-core new technologies and is going to have a much greater impact on enterprise IT managers and IT systems than Web 2.0. But ironically, it may not be until Web 4.0 (2020 - 2030) that Gartner comes to this conclusion!

Dangerous Situation in Burma Developing

The nation of Myanamar (Burma) is currently ruled by a repressive and corrupt military dictatorship. Past attempts to bring about democracy have met with violent crackdowns by the government, usually against unarmed civilians. In one past incident, approximately 3000 protesters were killed by the military.

Now a new situation is developing that could rapidly lead to mass civilian casualties, if the international community does not intervene in time. Led by thousands of Buddhist monks, approximately 100,000 Burmese civilians marched to demonstrate their support for democracy in Burma.

So far the military has not reacted with violence, but there are growing warning signs that this may happen soon. The international community, and all people who believe in freedom, should stand up and support the brave citizens of Burma who are putting their lives at risk for the principle of democracy, a principle which unfortunately is eroding worldwide according to a recent study.

Cool Women in Tech

Hey, I'm posting this to support my friend Kaliya's  (un)conference for women in  tech called She's Geeky, A Women's Tech (un)conference (October 22-23 in Mountain View, CA).

Here at  Radar Networks we're proud that we have a bunch of really smart women across all areas of the company including Sonja Erickson our awesome VP of systems, Jennifer Agostinelli who runs operations and makes our culture great, Karen Marcelo who hacks code and in her free time builds fire-breathing robots, Lara Fields who hacks RDF in a land called Cucamonga, Susan Mayo who is not only a woman in tech but also a woman in soccer, Tricia Royal who is a designer of many things, and just this week we added Kim Laama on UI, and soon two more women are joining our team. More than 1/3 of our staff are women -- Not bad for a company working on bleeding-edge tech!!!

The Semantic Web, Collective Intelligence and Hyperdata

I'm posting this in response to a recent post by Tim O'Reilly which focused on disambiguating what the Semantic Web is and is not, as well as the subject of Collective Intelligence. I generally agree with Tim's post, but I do have some points I would add by way of clarification. In particular, in my opinion,  the Semantic Web is all about collective intelligence, on several levels. I would also suggest that the term "hyperdata" is a possibly useful way to express what the Semantic Web is really all about.

What Makes Something a Semantic Web Application?

I agree with Tim that the term "Semantic Web" refers to the use of a particular set of emerging W3C open standards. These standards include RDF, OWL, SPARQL, and GRDDL. A key requirement for an application to have "Semantic Web inside" so to speak, is that it makes use of or is compatible with, at the very least, basic RDF. Another alternative definition is that for an application to be "Semantic Web" it must make at least some use of an ontology, using a W3C standard for doing so.

Semantic Versus Semantic Web

Many applications and services claim to be "semantic" in one manner or another, but that does not mean they are "Semantic Web." Semantic applications include any applications that can make sense of meaning, particularly in language such as unstructured text, or structured data in some cases. By this definition, all search engines today are somewhat "semantic" but few would qualify as "Semantic Web" apps.

The Difference Between "Data On the Web" and a "Web of Data"

The Semantic Web is principally about working with  data in a new and hopefully better way, and making that data available on the Web if desired in an open fashion such that other applications can understand and reuse it more easily. We call this idea "The Data Web" -- the notion is that we are transforming the Web from a distributed file server into something that is more like a distributed database.

Instead of the basic objects being web pages, they are actually pieces of data (triples) and records formed from them (sets, trees, graphs or objects comprised of triples). There can be any number of triples within a Web page, and there can also be triples on the Web that do not exist within Web pages at all -- they can come directly from databases for example.

One might respond to this by noting that there is already a lot of data on the Web, in XML and other formats -- how is the Semantic Web different from that? What is the difference between "Data on the Web" and the idea of "The Data Web?"

The best answer to this question that I have heard was something that Dean Allemang said at a recent Semantic Web SIG in Palo Alto. Dean said, "Sure there is data on the Web, but it's not actually a web of data."  The difference is that in the Semantic Web paradigm, the data can be linked to other data in other places, it's a web of data, not just data on the Web.

I call this concept of interconnected data, "Hyperdata." It does for data what hypertext did for text. I'm probably not the originator of this term, but I think it is a very useful term and analogy for explaining the value of the Semantic Web.

Another way to think of it is that the current Web is a big graph of interconnected nodes, where the nodes are usually HTML documents, but in the Semantic Web we are talking about a graph of interconnected data statements that can be as general or specific as you want. A data record is a set of data statements about the same subject, and they don't have to live in one place on the network -- they could be spread over many locations around the Web.

A statement to the effect of "Sue lives in Palo Alto" could exist on site A, refer to a URI for a statement defining Sue on site B, a URI for a statement that defines "lives in" on site C, and a URI for a statement defining "Palo Alto" on site D. That's a web of data. What's cool is that anyone can potentially add statements to this web of data, it can be completely emergent.

The Semantic Web is Built by and for Collective Intelligence

This is where I think Tim and others who think about the Semantic Web may be missing an essential point. The Semantic Web is in fact highly conducive to "collective intelligence." It doesn't require that machines add all the statements using fancy AI. In fact, in a next-generation folksonomy, when tags are created by human users, manually, they can easily be encoded as RDF statements. And by doing this you get lots of new capabilities, like being able to link tags to concepts that define their meaning, and to other related tags.

Humans can add tags that become semantic web content. They can do this manually or software can help them. Humans can also fill out forms that generate RDF behind the scenes, just as filling out a blog posting form generates HTML, XML, ATOM etc. Humans don't actually write all that code, software does it for them, yet blogging and wikis for example are considered to be collective intelligence tools.

So the concept of folksonomy and tagging is truly orthogonal to the Semantic Web. They are not mutually exclusive at all. In fact the Semantic Web -- or at least "Semantic Web Lite" (RDF + only basic use of OWL + basic SPARQL) is capable of modelling and publishing any data in the world in a more open way.

Any application that uses data could do everything it does using these technologies. Every single form of social, user-generated content and community could, and probably will, be implemented using RDF in one manner or another within the next decade or so. And in particular, RDF and OWL + SPARQL are ideal for social networking services -- the data model is a much better match for the structure of the data and the network of users and the kinds of queries that need to be done.

Folktologies

This notion that somehow the Semantic Web is not about folksonomy needs to be corrected. For example, take Metaweb's Freebase. Freebase is what I call a "folktology" -- it's an emergent, community generated ontology. Users collaborate to add to the ontology and the knowledge base that is populated within it. That's a wonderful example of collective intelligence, user generated content, and semantics (although technically to my knowledge they are not using RDF for this, their data model is from what I can see functionally equivalent and I would expect at least a SPARQL interface from them eventually).

But that's not all -- check out TagCommons and this Tag Ontology discussion, and also the SKOS ontology -- all of which are working on semantic ways of characterizing simple tags in order to enrich folksonomies and enable better collective intelligence.

There are at least two other places where the Semantic Web naturally leverages and supports collective intelligence. The first is the fact that people and software can generate triples (people could do it by hand, but generally they will do it by filling out Web forms or answering questions or dialog boxes etc.) and these triples can live all over the Web, yet interconnect or intersect (when they are about the same subjects or objects).

I can create data about a piece of data you created, for example to state that I agree with it, or that I know something else about it. You can create data about my data. Thus a data-set can be generated in a distributed way -- it's not unlike a wiki for example. It doesn't have to work this way, but at least it can if people do this.

The second point is that OWL, the ontology language, is designed to support an infinite number of ontologies -- there doesn't have to be just one big ontology to "rule them all." Anyone can make a simple or complex ontology and start to then make data statements that refer to it. Ontologies can link to or include other ontologies, or pieces of them, to create bigger distributed ontologies that cover more things.

This is kind of like not only mashing up the data, but also mashing up the schemas too. Both of these are examples of collective intelligence. In the case of ontologies, this is already happening, for example many ontologies already make use of other ontologies like the Dublin Core and Foaf.

The point here is that there is in fact a natural and very beneficial fit between the technologies of the Semantic Web and what Tim O'Reilly defines Web 2.0 to be about (essentially collective intelligence). In fact the designers of the underlying standards of the Semantic Web specifically had "collective intelligence" in mind when they came up with these ideas. They were specifically trying to rectify several problems in the closed, data-silo world of old fashioned databases. The big motivation was to make data more integrated, to enable applications to share data more easily, and to be able to build data with other data, and to build schemas with other schemas. It's all about enabling connections and network effects.

Now, whether people end up using these technologies to do interesting things that enable human-level collective intelligence (as opposed to just software level collective intelligence) is an open question. At least some companies such as my own Radar Networks and Metaweb, and Talis (thanks, Danny), are directly focused on this, and I think it is safe to say this will be a big emerging trend. RDF is a great fit for social and folksonomy-based applications.

Web 3.0 and the concept of "Hyperdata"

Where Tim defines Web 2.0 as being about collective intelligence generally, I would define Web 3.0 as being about "connective intelligence." It's about connecting data, concepts, applications and ultimately people. The real essence of what makes the Web great is that it enables a global hypertext medium in which collective intelligence can emerge. In the case of Web 3.0, which begins with the Data Web and will evolve into the full-blown Semantic Web over a decade or more, the key is that it enables a global hyperdata medium (not just hypertext).

As I mentioned above, hyperdata is to data what hypertext is to text. Hyperdata is a great word -- it is so simple and yet makes a big point. It's about data that links to other data. It does for data what hypertext does for text. That's what RDF and the Semantic Web are really all about. Reasoning is NOT the main point (but is a nice future side-effect...). The main point is about growing a web of data.

Just as the Web enabled a huge outpouring of collective intelligence via an open global hypertext medium, the Semantic Web is going to enable a similarly huge outpouring of collective knowledge and cognition via a global hyperdata medium. It's the Web, only better.

A Bottle That Purifies Enough Water for a Year

This is a really great invention -- a hand held water bottle that can purify a year's worth of water. It removes not only parasites and bacteria, but also viruses. It was just announced recently at a defense industry tradeshow and was a big hit among military commanders who need a better way to get water to their troops. Beyond that it could be a lifesaver in disaster areas and in developing countries where finding clean water is a daily struggle.

New Photon Thruster: Get to Mars in 1 Week!

An interesting new patent pending design for a photon thruster appears to be the real deal. Check out the article and who is behind it. (A fellow SRI alumnus!). Getting to Mars in a week means getting to the moon, as well as other nearby planets would be quite fast as well. This could be quite revolutionary.

TUSTIN, Calif., Sept. 7, 2007 -- An amplified photon thruster that could potentially shorten the trip to Mars from six months to a week has reportedly attracted the attention of aerospace agencies and contractors.

Young Bae, founder of the Bae Institute in Tustin, Calif., first demonstrated his photonic laser thruster (PLT), which he built with off-the-shelf components, in December.

Proposal for GRDDLR: The Open Source GRDDL Repository

Now that GRDDL is officially on its way to becoming a W3C open standard, I'm even more interested in its potential. For those who don't know, GRDDL provides a way to map from non-RDF data into RDF, on-the-fly. So for example, if a semantic web app needs data from some Web page, and that page does not contain RDF, a GRDDL transform can be provided that maps that Web page's content to appropriate RDF. The semantic web app can simply look for the presence of a GRDDL transform for that page and then generate RDF on the fly for it. Ok well that's probably an oversimplification but it gets the point across. Here are some nicely illustrative use-case examples that shed more light on the subject.

So this got me thinking. Where can semantic web app x find good GRDDL transforms to use? The current idea is that content creators will create and publish GRDDL for their own content. So the publisher of Web page x would have to create a GRDDL transform for it and host it on their site. When apps come along that need RDF they can check to see if this GRDDL information exists there, and if so they can use it.

But that approach puts all the burden on content publishers -- many of whom may be slow to adopt GRDDL until they see some real demand for it. So how could we get this started faster?

This is pure speculation at this point, but what if there was a central open site -- a sourceforge of sorts -- where anyone could create and publish a GRDDL transform for anything that has a URI. Let's call it GRDDLR (GRDDL + R for "Repository").

Open Source Projects for Extracting Data and Metadata from Files & the Web

I've been looking around for open-source libraries (preferably in Java, but not required) for extracting data and metadata from common file formats and Web formats. One project that looks very promising is Aperture. Do you know of any others that are ready or almost ready for prime-time use? Please let me know in the comments! Thanks.

Microsoft Astoria Not Supporting RDF

Microsoft's Astoria project has decided to make RDF a lower priority and is not supporting it for now. So much for Microsoft participating in the Semantic Web.

The Astoria project page describes the project thusly:

The goal of Microsoft Codename Astoria is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by web clients within a corporate network and across the internet. The data service is reachable over HTTP, and URIs are used to identify the various pieces of information available through the service. Interactions with the data service happens in terms of HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, and the data exchanged in those interactions is represented in simple formats such as XML and JSON.

That sounds like a perfect description of a Web 3.0 service-- and a perfect use-case for RDF and SPARQL!  But the team at Astoria doesn't seem to feel anyone is actually using RDF enough to warrant supporting that open standard. Well, perhaps among Microsoft's customers that is true enough. But on the other hand, this is a missed opportunity to exercise forward-thinking leadership that will pay dividends to Microsoft in the future when millions of developers and applications will be using RDF as their common language. When is that future? Perhaps as soon as 2 - 3 years. Certainly not more than 5 years.

Welcome to the age of openness: The more open your platform and data, the more developers will want to use it. RDF is one of the ways to make data more open, and supporting it in a data-web platform makes good sense. But it's hard to teach a an old god new tricks!

Rogue Nodes Turn Tor Anonymizer Into Private Listening Post

A security researcher has figured out a novel way to compromise the security of messages traveling in the Tor anonymizer network. Messages in the Tor network are encrypted as they travel from node to node to their final destination. But the last node has to decrypt the messages before it can deliver them to their final destination on the Internet. Many Tor users mistakenly believe their message remains encrypted through the entire Tor network, when in fact this is not the case: the last node must decrypt them. The researcher simply ran a few of these nodes and was able to read all unencrypted last-node traffic that came through them. This included sensitive communications of many government embassies around the world. The researcher believes that intelligence agencies around the world are already taking advantage of this weakness to eavesdrop on Tor traffic. Interestingly, when he pointed this security hole out to some of the embassies that were sending non-secure message they didn't respond or even appear to understand the problem. Read more here.

DBpedia.org is Among the Coolest Semantic Web Datasets I've Seen

I've been poking around in the DBpedia, and I'm amazed at the progress. It is definitely one of the coolest (launched) example of the Semantic Web I've seen. It's going to be a truly useful resource to everyone. If you haven't heard of it yet, check it out!

Reverse Anthropology: Native Tribe Visits UK to Study Brits

Check out this fascinating article about a new show on the BBC:

ne bright morning in St James's Park and a stream of tourists approaches Buckingham Palace, where trumpets will shortly herald the Changing of the Guard. In the middle of the crowd walk five very short, very odd-looking men. They carry camcorders, gesticulate wildly, and talk in a language no one can understand. In the heart of picture-postcard London, this bizarre group stands out like a sore thumb.                                         

  Further investigation reveals that a film crew is tracking the party, at a   discreet distance. Something is going on. In fact, the cameras are bearing   witness to a historic event: the odd-looking group, whose skin is dark and   whose smiles are wide, and who all measure around five feet tall, are on the   verge of completing an extraordinary social experiment.

Russian Scientists Discover Radiation Absorbing Mineral

Russian scientists in the Khibinsky Mountains in the Arctic Circle have made an important scientific discovery. They've found a new mineral which absorbs radiation.     It does not yet have an official name and is known only as number 27-4. It can absorb radioactivity from liquid nuclear waste.

Read the rest here.