The world beyond Web 2.0

I was privileged enough to sit in on a seminar recently by Annie Rowland-Campbell, a researcher from FujiXerox. She’s been doing research into semantic technologies and preparing the way for organisations to move beyond Web 2.0.

Annie’s research suggests that the web will become more and more immersive in the coming years — something we’re starting to see with applications like Second Life and games like World of Warcraft. To provide users with a more immersive and information rich experience, systems will ultimately need to better understand an individual’s context.

Context will help provide systems with the ability to intuit what people want (and what they also might need) and serve it up to them without users having to search and browse and differentiate what information is of value to them (and what is not of value). This understanding of context will be based largely on an understanding of who a user is, and what their personal needs are. And this technology to deliver this experience is actually not far away. In fact, the capability exists today through ontologies and semantic technologies.

Without semantic technologies driving the web, we can only produce context through direct points of integration with information. We can tag, categorise, and add other pieces of metadata directly into documents and link databases together where we identify that information has connections. Unfortunately, this traditional information technology approach requires meanings and relationships to be predefined and “hard wired” into data formats and the application program code at design time. This means that when something changes (which it always does in the human-centric world) the systems involved need to be changed in order to interoperate in a new way — a lengthy, messy, and manually intensive process.

Semantic technologies, though, are “meaning-centred”. They encode relationships, meaning, and context separately from data and content files, and separately from the application. This separation of layers allows systems to provide context that can change and adapt as the world around which information exists changes — exactly what is needed for the truly immersive, context-driven experiences required by Web 3.0 and Web 4.0. It could potentially even allow systems to ‘learn’ based on their own experiences of the changes in context. But how can we start to deliver context?

Topic Maps can provide the ontological layer required to describe context in addition to the metadata and data layers.

Utilising a Topic Map as the point of integration between systems will decrease the number of integration points required to deliver context. In this example, introducing an ontological layer decreases the number of points of integration from 24 to just 6.

It’s an interesting paradigm shift for Service Oriented Architecture models and database designs because it allows context to be added and data adapted to an evolving- rather than a static-world because its generally only the relationships between pieces of information that change, not the information itself (assuming that change in information is largely a factor of time, so new pieces of information only result in new versions).

A Topic Map used in this space enables machines, as well as people to understand, share and reason with information when its called upon. With this approach, adding, changing and implementing new relationships or interconnecting programs in a different way can be just as simple as changing the external model that these systems share.

Given a question, query, or report request, the ontology layer can access topics, concepts, associations that span a vast number of sources. It’s an approach:

• that has already gained traction in Finland (which is no surprise to me given that Northern Europe is where Topic Maps (ISO/IEC 13250:2000) were born). Here the ontology layers are being used to provide context and points of interchange where standards and language differ between EU countries.

• that is employed by Reuters in their Calais system to provide reporting capability based on context. Theirs is the reporting equivalent of “do you want fries with that?” and “…you may also be interested in…”

• that is being developed by the German government in partnership with SAP and Siemens in a project worth around €440m

As the web moves more toward immersive environments and intelligent agents, this approach is exactly what businesses need to begin to adopt in order to meet future system design needs, the needs and expectations of their users, and survive the evolution of Web 2.0 into Web 3.0 and beyond.

M