Software application development
This blog is intended to provoke discussion and exchange between like minded software application developers, engineers, architects, project managers - and keen hobbyists too.
Tuesday 30 June 2009, 9:34 AM
Windows Embedded: Seeds of Hope for Student Developers?
Back in 2003 when we all had travel budgets and that sort of thing, Microsoft would fly journalists out to locations like Brazil to cover the finals of its student developer competition which it calls the Imagine Cup. Although I missed the Brazil trip by a whisper, the event is still run and it did afford me the chance to see part of the event staged at the Telecom Tower a couple of years ago.
So it was Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio with a cocktail, or the Telecom Tower with a mini bottle of Stella and a packet of Twiglets. I know, there’s not much in it is there?
Anyway, this year (with finals in Cairo this week) the good people at Microsoft have remembered that I seem to talk about this event on a fairly regular basis. As such, they sent me not quite a flight to Egypt (despite me having connections with plenty of Egyptian media having worked in the country), but instead – a gleaming set of press materials.
Now in its seventh year, this year’s theme is, “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems facing us today.” Students have been asked to create technology solutions that align to the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). According to Microsoft back in 2003, there were a thousand competitors from 11 countries – and the first winner now has his own company with 27 employees - fast forward to 2009 and the Imagine Cup has attracted over 300,000 students from more than 100 countries.
So ranting aside, the ‘Embedded Development’ category appears to stand out in this year’s Imagine Cup. This portion of the competition challenges students to go beyond the PC/desktop and work in both hardware and software to build an embedded solution using Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2. Students are given the X86-based DM&P/ICOP eBox-4300 hardware, on which contestants run Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2 and Visual Studio, a suite of software development tools.
The embedded development category sees entries in fields such as agriculture, education, green innovations and healthcare. Here’s a snapshot of a couple of the finalists:
A team called PARV from the USA have created a medicine-dispensing kiosk, which can offer local communities basic medical advice and diagnoses and intelligently dispense a variety of over-the-counter medicines, after taking and analysing users’ temperature, or checking their pulse.
NB: remember, these are all college level students.
Egypt’s own Medbox created a solution that allows RFID tags to be secured to blood samples, medical equipment and patients to better track people and critical medical information. This is hoped to vastly reduce the number of blood mismatches during transfusions.
Intellectronics, from the Ukraine developed the Mobile e-Health System (MeHS) a mobile, cost-effective solution that provides rural communities and emergency services with real-time remote medical access.
Now the Imagine Cup may have open source purists choking on their hoummus and baba-ganoush. The students’ wild-eyed enthusiasm is generally matched by a burning desire to win the event and the prospect of a first job with Microsoft. But to simply criticise would be unfair.
This event champions student coders, it also allows natural team development to shine through. One student has to take on the sales/marketing role and present their solution while others (in the teams of three or four) often take on the back office roles and look after more of the nuts and bolts.
Anyway chaps, enjoy the Pyramids, enjoy the chance to witness young coders doing well and most of all – avoid Abdul Rahman’s kebab and falafel store round the back of Tahreya Square in central Cairo where I caught amoebic dysentery from one of his dodgy unwashed plates OK?
So it was Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio with a cocktail, or the Telecom Tower with a mini bottle of Stella and a packet of Twiglets. I know, there’s not much in it is there?
Anyway, this year (with finals in Cairo this week) the good people at Microsoft have remembered that I seem to talk about this event on a fairly regular basis. As such, they sent me not quite a flight to Egypt (despite me having connections with plenty of Egyptian media having worked in the country), but instead – a gleaming set of press materials.
Now in its seventh year, this year’s theme is, “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems facing us today.” Students have been asked to create technology solutions that align to the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). According to Microsoft back in 2003, there were a thousand competitors from 11 countries – and the first winner now has his own company with 27 employees - fast forward to 2009 and the Imagine Cup has attracted over 300,000 students from more than 100 countries.
So ranting aside, the ‘Embedded Development’ category appears to stand out in this year’s Imagine Cup. This portion of the competition challenges students to go beyond the PC/desktop and work in both hardware and software to build an embedded solution using Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2. Students are given the X86-based DM&P/ICOP eBox-4300 hardware, on which contestants run Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2 and Visual Studio, a suite of software development tools.
The embedded development category sees entries in fields such as agriculture, education, green innovations and healthcare. Here’s a snapshot of a couple of the finalists:
A team called PARV from the USA have created a medicine-dispensing kiosk, which can offer local communities basic medical advice and diagnoses and intelligently dispense a variety of over-the-counter medicines, after taking and analysing users’ temperature, or checking their pulse.
NB: remember, these are all college level students.
Egypt’s own Medbox created a solution that allows RFID tags to be secured to blood samples, medical equipment and patients to better track people and critical medical information. This is hoped to vastly reduce the number of blood mismatches during transfusions.
Intellectronics, from the Ukraine developed the Mobile e-Health System (MeHS) a mobile, cost-effective solution that provides rural communities and emergency services with real-time remote medical access.
Now the Imagine Cup may have open source purists choking on their hoummus and baba-ganoush. The students’ wild-eyed enthusiasm is generally matched by a burning desire to win the event and the prospect of a first job with Microsoft. But to simply criticise would be unfair.
This event champions student coders, it also allows natural team development to shine through. One student has to take on the sales/marketing role and present their solution while others (in the teams of three or four) often take on the back office roles and look after more of the nuts and bolts.
Anyway chaps, enjoy the Pyramids, enjoy the chance to witness young coders doing well and most of all – avoid Abdul Rahman’s kebab and falafel store round the back of Tahreya Square in central Cairo where I caught amoebic dysentery from one of his dodgy unwashed plates OK?
Friday 26 June 2009, 9:09 AM
A Norwegian Technology Odyssey
I've spent a couple of days in Oslo, Norway this week meeting with a few local IT companies and have been profoundly impressed by the country's attitude to technology and the way it works to develop it.
IT is now the second largest land-based industry in Norway by turnover (after natural resources) and it supersedes any of the country's prowess in mining or fishing, as it represents the flagship business for which this nation is recognised.
I've been impressed by Norwegian engineering excellence since I read Thor Heyedalh's seminal book Kon-Tiki Expedition, which detailed the travels of a bunch of seemingly foolhardy ethnographers setting sail by raft from Peru to the South Seas to try and prove historical human migratory patterns. They worked it out on paper and built a balsa raft and survived.
Today, Norway is recognised for its development of software and integrated systems, many of course in the mobile space. Visiting the offices of some software development firms here in Oslo this week, it appears to me that laid back team work is taken to a new level here. Shorts and T-shirts, dogs in the office, fruit and cake when you need it, toboggans and skis in the corner of the office and a massive Wii projection wall chill out room for those developers who just need to cut loose for half an hour.
It's probably the most American country I've ever been to in Europe in some senses. With so so much of our software development having emanated from Silicon Valley in recent years, maybe that's a good thing? History books suggest that the Viking Leif Ericsson discovered America in round about the year 1000 and named it Vinland three times. History also suggests that he was actually looking for Greenland and anyway, a pesky Italian called Columbus then came along and took all the credit 500 years later.
As well as mobile, Norwegian IT companies have reportedly also been pioneers in the fields of telemedicine and remote learning. The country's more advanced public-sector solutions are even starting to find international buyers. The Norwegian government's official ICT pages state that the country's technology pedigree leads it to be extremely focused on the 'user-facing' aspect of web-based, desktop and mobile software development.
According to Innovation Norway.org, “Norwegian companies are at the forefront of Internet technologies, including the development of multi-functional web- and intranet sites, super-fast web browsers, on-line games and e-commerce solutions. The Norwegian ICT industry excels at finding user-friendly solutions that put the user and interaction between people first.”
Listening to the strange contortions of the local Scandinavian tongue here you might wonder how they pull off international user-facing communication so well. Well, you might wonder that until you hear everyone from chief technology officers down to tram drivers speak in fluent English without a single grammatical slip up. Heck, they even won the Eurovision again just now didn't they?
Although I'm still looking for a more up to date report, but a BBC report citing the World Economic Forum a couple of years back now said that the US was no longer the technology king – and if you look at the table shown here, you'll see a VERY heavy Scandinavian presence.
So, no need to mention any brand names here. You'll all know many of the famous ones, especially the mobile phone company named after a Viking. Norway is fabulous, so easy to like and the people are some of the most carefree in Europe. I've not felt so welcome by a foreign European nation since I was last in Italy. So that must be good.
Just one more reason to like Norway all you Abba fans out there, Anni-Frid Lyngstad is not from Sweden you know – she was born in the Norwegian town of Narvik. A-ha! I hear you say.
IT is now the second largest land-based industry in Norway by turnover (after natural resources) and it supersedes any of the country's prowess in mining or fishing, as it represents the flagship business for which this nation is recognised.
I've been impressed by Norwegian engineering excellence since I read Thor Heyedalh's seminal book Kon-Tiki Expedition, which detailed the travels of a bunch of seemingly foolhardy ethnographers setting sail by raft from Peru to the South Seas to try and prove historical human migratory patterns. They worked it out on paper and built a balsa raft and survived.
Today, Norway is recognised for its development of software and integrated systems, many of course in the mobile space. Visiting the offices of some software development firms here in Oslo this week, it appears to me that laid back team work is taken to a new level here. Shorts and T-shirts, dogs in the office, fruit and cake when you need it, toboggans and skis in the corner of the office and a massive Wii projection wall chill out room for those developers who just need to cut loose for half an hour.
It's probably the most American country I've ever been to in Europe in some senses. With so so much of our software development having emanated from Silicon Valley in recent years, maybe that's a good thing? History books suggest that the Viking Leif Ericsson discovered America in round about the year 1000 and named it Vinland three times. History also suggests that he was actually looking for Greenland and anyway, a pesky Italian called Columbus then came along and took all the credit 500 years later.
As well as mobile, Norwegian IT companies have reportedly also been pioneers in the fields of telemedicine and remote learning. The country's more advanced public-sector solutions are even starting to find international buyers. The Norwegian government's official ICT pages state that the country's technology pedigree leads it to be extremely focused on the 'user-facing' aspect of web-based, desktop and mobile software development.
According to Innovation Norway.org, “Norwegian companies are at the forefront of Internet technologies, including the development of multi-functional web- and intranet sites, super-fast web browsers, on-line games and e-commerce solutions. The Norwegian ICT industry excels at finding user-friendly solutions that put the user and interaction between people first.”
Listening to the strange contortions of the local Scandinavian tongue here you might wonder how they pull off international user-facing communication so well. Well, you might wonder that until you hear everyone from chief technology officers down to tram drivers speak in fluent English without a single grammatical slip up. Heck, they even won the Eurovision again just now didn't they?
Although I'm still looking for a more up to date report, but a BBC report citing the World Economic Forum a couple of years back now said that the US was no longer the technology king – and if you look at the table shown here, you'll see a VERY heavy Scandinavian presence.
So, no need to mention any brand names here. You'll all know many of the famous ones, especially the mobile phone company named after a Viking. Norway is fabulous, so easy to like and the people are some of the most carefree in Europe. I've not felt so welcome by a foreign European nation since I was last in Italy. So that must be good.
Just one more reason to like Norway all you Abba fans out there, Anni-Frid Lyngstad is not from Sweden you know – she was born in the Norwegian town of Narvik. A-ha! I hear you say.
Wednesday 24 June 2009, 7:48 AM
Web Middleware – The Next Great Developer Cash Cow?
I was in a meeting with a web design and development company on Monday who has produced a forms-based data management solution. This product interfaces between a site's core customer facing forms and the data (in this case in the form of emails) that are produced from the site's bowels when users make requests, orders or communicate with the company in any other way.
The company's lead development guru and I got to talking about this level of web service technology and questioned whether “web middleware” will be the next cash cow for Internet revenue streams. Looking the term up during our meeting I was slightly embarrassed to see that it has been in relatively wide usage for over a decade now – one of the earliest references being a story on InfoWorld.
But should I have been embarrassed? Is this a burgeoning technology that is set to be the next major earner for web 2.0 (and dare I say it – even web 3.0) focused firms?
Intel James Reinders talks often about the fact that some technologies surface, spend a decade or so in a kind of 'developing but not quite ready yet' development phase – and then enjoy full adoption.
In the same morning I got to reading about an outfit called TheWebService
whose SOA-based – yet to be formally announced – 'offering' will, according to the company, address the issue of integrating disparate data silos without using 'costly' middleware & programming teams.
Well firstly, I question the term costly. A lot of this web middleware is sold on a license basis for as little as ten pounds per month. But let's get to the punchline.
Corporate data becomes, disparate, fragmented, unmanaged and badly stockpiled in different formats. Yes we know that. But TheWebService's MD
Guy Mucklow reckons that his new web service technology can seek out and integrate this data, then pipe it in real-time through a secure web-based platform.
“Automatic code generation will even let IT depts build their own web services around the live data, with myriad applications - e.g. current stock levels can be displayed on a customer-facing web site,” said Mucklow. “The idea of MyFeeds means users can effectively 'mashup' their own data with commercial sets, for matching, screening, enhancement or anything else, without having to build a dedicated data mart.”
So, mashed up web data that is integrated into commercially-driven and correctly monetised platforms could be just what Twitter needs to start making money. For Twitter, web middleware really ought to be the cash cow then? If they know that x% of people in Russia posted URLs related to xyz subject between 10am and midday, then leveraging that data in a mashed up integrated contextualised way is what it's all about. Or at least it could be soon. Don't ya reckon?
The company's lead development guru and I got to talking about this level of web service technology and questioned whether “web middleware” will be the next cash cow for Internet revenue streams. Looking the term up during our meeting I was slightly embarrassed to see that it has been in relatively wide usage for over a decade now – one of the earliest references being a story on InfoWorld.
But should I have been embarrassed? Is this a burgeoning technology that is set to be the next major earner for web 2.0 (and dare I say it – even web 3.0) focused firms?
Intel James Reinders talks often about the fact that some technologies surface, spend a decade or so in a kind of 'developing but not quite ready yet' development phase – and then enjoy full adoption.
In the same morning I got to reading about an outfit called TheWebService
whose SOA-based – yet to be formally announced – 'offering' will, according to the company, address the issue of integrating disparate data silos without using 'costly' middleware & programming teams.
Well firstly, I question the term costly. A lot of this web middleware is sold on a license basis for as little as ten pounds per month. But let's get to the punchline.
Corporate data becomes, disparate, fragmented, unmanaged and badly stockpiled in different formats. Yes we know that. But TheWebService's MD
Guy Mucklow reckons that his new web service technology can seek out and integrate this data, then pipe it in real-time through a secure web-based platform.
“Automatic code generation will even let IT depts build their own web services around the live data, with myriad applications - e.g. current stock levels can be displayed on a customer-facing web site,” said Mucklow. “The idea of MyFeeds means users can effectively 'mashup' their own data with commercial sets, for matching, screening, enhancement or anything else, without having to build a dedicated data mart.”
So, mashed up web data that is integrated into commercially-driven and correctly monetised platforms could be just what Twitter needs to start making money. For Twitter, web middleware really ought to be the cash cow then? If they know that x% of people in Russia posted URLs related to xyz subject between 10am and midday, then leveraging that data in a mashed up integrated contextualised way is what it's all about. Or at least it could be soon. Don't ya reckon?
Monday 22 June 2009, 8:51 AM
Is Website-Envy Provoking Digital Plagiarism?
Programmers involved in web design and development are arguably somewhat distanced from the nature, form and origin of much of the content that they make sparkle and shine. Should we be surprised then by news of data that shows an 89 per cent rise in the number of content disputes involving web sites over the past year and research showing that of 152 UK SMEs questioned, more than one third (39 per cent) admit to currently feeling envious of a web site belonging to a competitor. Could this envy be translating itself in digital plagiarism do you think?
Personally, I do a spot of copywriting for an RIA-specialist web design agency who look after clients including a well-known coffee brand. Although their site is super slick and sparkles beautifully with Flash, AIR and Silverlight goodies, I’m willing to bet that the design team doesn’t spend hours pouring (no pun intended) over the bean brewing content that they dutifully host up when they are given it. Not that that it should be their responsibility anyway.
Wasn’t it English author and Anglican priest William Ralph Ing who said, “What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.”
Technology journalism also suffers from this problem. As soon as I post this blog it will crop up as a headline on various ‘news-crawler’ type aggregation sites. I suppose the difference being that these sites will host a link directly back to the original source here on ZDNet.co.uk. What we are talking about in the wider sense here is the theft of whole chunks of content and the re-purposing of it under a completely new guise.
The aforementioned survey emanated from a web hosting provider called Fasthosts Internet Ltd. The company suggests that an alarming number of UK firms are finding that material (such as artwork, descriptive text or product images) has been copied from their web site and published elsewhere. The problem varies from the occasional image being used to entire web site designs being replicated. Fasthosts operates its own in-house ‘Abuse Department’ (no Monty Python argument jokes please) so I guess they would know.
Spending a lot of time looking at web developer and designer touch-points and always keen to examine the burning issues of the day as I am. I actually used Sunday to get in touch with Fasthosts through a friend of a friend and the company’s Steve Holford told me, “It is particularly the case that in a challenging economic climate such as now, that business owners may be tempted by the quick-fix of copying another firm’s work. Significantly, we found that 10 per cent of participants in our survey had at least one item of their own company web site copied by a third party between March 2008 and March 2009.”
I also contacted a quite prolific chap called Aral Balkan who describes himself as a ‘User Experience Designer and Developer’ on this subject. Aral told me, ”If you're producing online content, chances are that you will have to deal with plagiarism, copyright infringement and identity misappropriation at some point in your career. In my experience, very few content producers today are aware of their own intellectual property rights. Many don't even know that copyright is inherent in any work you produce, that you don't have to register your work. Even fewer understand the importance of licensing their work – whether under Creative Commons or a commercial license – and the differences between various licenses which can have a profound impact on the balance between the amount of control you maintain over your work and what other people can do with it.”
“At the very least, I would urge everyone – content producers and consumers (not that those two roles are mutually exclusive these days) – to read up on the various Creative Commons licenses and the differences between them and to always publish their work with some sort of license, even if it is a public domain declaration,” he added.
What’s the answer then? Surely we need automated tools to scrape the web looking for highlighted phrases in recently posted content to constantly look for plagiarised material. These must exist already but if they were used more would this make a difference? Sadly I think probably not. Perhaps the advent of web 3.0 will see much of this eradicated as the web becomes a more sophisticated and more fully evolved beast as it must logically do in the years ahead.
Personally, I do a spot of copywriting for an RIA-specialist web design agency who look after clients including a well-known coffee brand. Although their site is super slick and sparkles beautifully with Flash, AIR and Silverlight goodies, I’m willing to bet that the design team doesn’t spend hours pouring (no pun intended) over the bean brewing content that they dutifully host up when they are given it. Not that that it should be their responsibility anyway.
Wasn’t it English author and Anglican priest William Ralph Ing who said, “What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.”
Technology journalism also suffers from this problem. As soon as I post this blog it will crop up as a headline on various ‘news-crawler’ type aggregation sites. I suppose the difference being that these sites will host a link directly back to the original source here on ZDNet.co.uk. What we are talking about in the wider sense here is the theft of whole chunks of content and the re-purposing of it under a completely new guise.
The aforementioned survey emanated from a web hosting provider called Fasthosts Internet Ltd. The company suggests that an alarming number of UK firms are finding that material (such as artwork, descriptive text or product images) has been copied from their web site and published elsewhere. The problem varies from the occasional image being used to entire web site designs being replicated. Fasthosts operates its own in-house ‘Abuse Department’ (no Monty Python argument jokes please) so I guess they would know.
Spending a lot of time looking at web developer and designer touch-points and always keen to examine the burning issues of the day as I am. I actually used Sunday to get in touch with Fasthosts through a friend of a friend and the company’s Steve Holford told me, “It is particularly the case that in a challenging economic climate such as now, that business owners may be tempted by the quick-fix of copying another firm’s work. Significantly, we found that 10 per cent of participants in our survey had at least one item of their own company web site copied by a third party between March 2008 and March 2009.”
I also contacted a quite prolific chap called Aral Balkan who describes himself as a ‘User Experience Designer and Developer’ on this subject. Aral told me, ”If you're producing online content, chances are that you will have to deal with plagiarism, copyright infringement and identity misappropriation at some point in your career. In my experience, very few content producers today are aware of their own intellectual property rights. Many don't even know that copyright is inherent in any work you produce, that you don't have to register your work. Even fewer understand the importance of licensing their work – whether under Creative Commons or a commercial license – and the differences between various licenses which can have a profound impact on the balance between the amount of control you maintain over your work and what other people can do with it.”
“At the very least, I would urge everyone – content producers and consumers (not that those two roles are mutually exclusive these days) – to read up on the various Creative Commons licenses and the differences between them and to always publish their work with some sort of license, even if it is a public domain declaration,” he added.
What’s the answer then? Surely we need automated tools to scrape the web looking for highlighted phrases in recently posted content to constantly look for plagiarised material. These must exist already but if they were used more would this make a difference? Sadly I think probably not. Perhaps the advent of web 3.0 will see much of this eradicated as the web becomes a more sophisticated and more fully evolved beast as it must logically do in the years ahead.
Friday 19 June 2009, 8:18 AM
Web 3.0 Community Launches for Semantic Web Developers
As we all know, web 1.0 was where it all started in a totally non-dynamic dial-up ‘go and look for it kind of a way’. Web 2.0 is pretty much where we are now with blogs, social media, push content, broadband, streaming and interconnectivity at every level. Web 3.0 on the other hand seems to take more explaining.
I have actually had conversations with other IT press who don’t seem to know about web 3.0 and the intelligent Rich Internet Applications that are typified by their use of natural language processing, machine-based learning & reasoning and an overall ability to pertain to the syntax of the data being processed.
Logically then, from that syntax, we get the ‘semantic’ web.
With this next tier of cyberspace still in it’s formative years, it is of direct interest (to me at least) to see which companies are taking the lead in terms of both development and design. When a Google search of the term “Adobe’s web 3.0 strategy” does not lead directly to an Adobe Labs web page (check it – it doesn’t) you might start to wonder who is going to lead the march.
Could this be a case of the dot com bubble re-inflating? Will smaller companies drive the new revolution? Will the revolution be televised on web 3.0 live streamed TV? It’s all too early to say isn’t it?
Instead of Microsoft’s Silverlight team mailing me on this subject this week (or Adobe’s for that matter) I did get a nod from a company in a place dear to my heart, Annapolis Maryland, a place I plan to live one day. Somewhere in between the crab shacks and the US Naval Academy lies a company called OpenAmplify who this week opened up an online developer community for collaboration and innovation related to the semantic web. The company says that this is the only generally available web service that can identify sentiment and guidance from text. As such, it is allowing open access to its patented natural language processing technology (NLP).
OpenAmplify says that community members can create new projects or participate in ongoing developments, as well as communicate with other members that have similar interests and affinities.
“Our goal is to help drive towards a more comprehensive web, based on an understanding of the full range of human interactions in content and conversations,” said Mike Petit, CIO of OpenAmplify. “The community will collaborate to create real-world applications, advance academic and applied research and foster an innovative culture.”
As an initial promotion, the company is running a Firefox Gmail Challenge. Lasting until July 16, 2009, users can win cash prizes and other user benefits to create a Firefox add-on that extends the functionality of Gmail using OpenAmplify.
As we know, human beings can use the web to look up the Norwegian for “banana sandwich” and interpret how to use it in the context of a conversation taking place elsewhere. Computers do not posses that degree of contextual and syntactical cognisance. The semantic web 3.0 is a vision of information that is understandable by computers.
For an external opinion on this subject, I used good old web 2.0 technologies (Twitter, email and Safari 4.0.1) to get in touch with Dave McComb who is president of Semantic Arts, a company founded with the aim of specialising in providing enterprise-level application and architectural consulting.
From his iPhone keypad long after official work hours had ended last night McComb commented, “Let's start with what web 3.0 really is. It's a web of data (as opposed to a web of documents or a web of people). Meaning a web of machine-readable data. Meaning turning the web into a huge database that can be queried in an analogous way to querying a database without requiring you to master the schemas of all the sites you'll interrogate.”
“Phase 1 is upon us now. The New York Times today (Thursday June 18) just committed a huge corpus of data to the Linked Open Data cloud. This is several hundred billion assertion codes to semantic web standards. Check out SemanticUniverse.com for the NYT announcement and other background material,” added McComb.
So the ‘semantic web’ then - it is coming; will you be a part of its development? I think it’s great to follow companies that are driving forward in this space even it’s hard to judge their ultimate worth at this stage.
I have actually had conversations with other IT press who don’t seem to know about web 3.0 and the intelligent Rich Internet Applications that are typified by their use of natural language processing, machine-based learning & reasoning and an overall ability to pertain to the syntax of the data being processed.
Logically then, from that syntax, we get the ‘semantic’ web.
With this next tier of cyberspace still in it’s formative years, it is of direct interest (to me at least) to see which companies are taking the lead in terms of both development and design. When a Google search of the term “Adobe’s web 3.0 strategy” does not lead directly to an Adobe Labs web page (check it – it doesn’t) you might start to wonder who is going to lead the march.
Could this be a case of the dot com bubble re-inflating? Will smaller companies drive the new revolution? Will the revolution be televised on web 3.0 live streamed TV? It’s all too early to say isn’t it?
Instead of Microsoft’s Silverlight team mailing me on this subject this week (or Adobe’s for that matter) I did get a nod from a company in a place dear to my heart, Annapolis Maryland, a place I plan to live one day. Somewhere in between the crab shacks and the US Naval Academy lies a company called OpenAmplify who this week opened up an online developer community for collaboration and innovation related to the semantic web. The company says that this is the only generally available web service that can identify sentiment and guidance from text. As such, it is allowing open access to its patented natural language processing technology (NLP).
OpenAmplify says that community members can create new projects or participate in ongoing developments, as well as communicate with other members that have similar interests and affinities.
“Our goal is to help drive towards a more comprehensive web, based on an understanding of the full range of human interactions in content and conversations,” said Mike Petit, CIO of OpenAmplify. “The community will collaborate to create real-world applications, advance academic and applied research and foster an innovative culture.”
As an initial promotion, the company is running a Firefox Gmail Challenge. Lasting until July 16, 2009, users can win cash prizes and other user benefits to create a Firefox add-on that extends the functionality of Gmail using OpenAmplify.
As we know, human beings can use the web to look up the Norwegian for “banana sandwich” and interpret how to use it in the context of a conversation taking place elsewhere. Computers do not posses that degree of contextual and syntactical cognisance. The semantic web 3.0 is a vision of information that is understandable by computers.
For an external opinion on this subject, I used good old web 2.0 technologies (Twitter, email and Safari 4.0.1) to get in touch with Dave McComb who is president of Semantic Arts, a company founded with the aim of specialising in providing enterprise-level application and architectural consulting.
From his iPhone keypad long after official work hours had ended last night McComb commented, “Let's start with what web 3.0 really is. It's a web of data (as opposed to a web of documents or a web of people). Meaning a web of machine-readable data. Meaning turning the web into a huge database that can be queried in an analogous way to querying a database without requiring you to master the schemas of all the sites you'll interrogate.”
“Phase 1 is upon us now. The New York Times today (Thursday June 18) just committed a huge corpus of data to the Linked Open Data cloud. This is several hundred billion assertion codes to semantic web standards. Check out SemanticUniverse.com for the NYT announcement and other background material,” added McComb.
So the ‘semantic web’ then - it is coming; will you be a part of its development? I think it’s great to follow companies that are driving forward in this space even it’s hard to judge their ultimate worth at this stage.
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