Diane-Michel.com

For the last three months, I have been experimenting with various open source programs to try and deterimine the best way to build a collaborative community.  Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Simply my opinions:

WordPress: Plus
Extremely fast spiderability.   Beautiful clean code without a lot of hoopla.   Easy to read, update and navigate.   A lot of open source code available, used everywhere. Free templates available, easily changed out.   WordPress was used to make this blog.

WordPress: Negative
Would need to figure out how to transform from just a blog to a community blog & forum to be effective as a collective intelligence platform.

Joomla: Plus
Has a   lot of open source widgets that will plug in to let you run a community. Can look very flashy, and appealing for awhile, till the design grows tiresome.   Some free templates, mostly paid.

Joomla: Negative
 Unless you know how to redesign the plethora of less then pleasing templates out there, you will always feel dissatisfied.   Most people are not PHP programmers.   It’s not easy to figure out.   If you are a designer you mindset is towards creating design, not figuring out PHP code.   I have been  a designer since 1989.   Therefore I have certain hopes and aspirations for the look and feel of a community.   Despite spending quite a bit on template subscriptions, I have never found one that looked professional enough that I could live with.    Can be dangerous to upload components and modules from third parties.

Joomla control panels are just plain confusing.  I found myself constantly trying to  figure out where certain user areas were within the control panel, and how to access the modules to get the information in.   When  beginning with  someone else’s idea of how something is designed, you are at a disadvantage from the very beginning.   I purchased two e-books on how to customize Joomla, and even a Dreamweaver addon.   I frankly didn’t have the patience to muddle through them though, especially when I realized Google just didn’t care.   It’s difficult to get spidered – it’s just that simple.   I even submitted an xml feed direct to Google.  If you look at the code behind on a Joomla site you realize what a jumble it really is.

Wikimedia: Positive
Looks just like Wikipedia, because it’s made by the same open source individuals.  Most people are familiar with this interface, and that familiarity  brings comfort and efficiency.   Provides for true collaboration as users provide information and others help to edit.   Spiders very efficiently.   Can translate to various languages quickly and easily.

Wikimedia: Negative
Difficult to format at times.   However,    if the Web master provides  quick tip page it helps considerably.    Whomever can do whatever they want to your pages, unless you intentionally set up permissions or log in information.

 Drupal: Plus
If you are really intent on starting a community,   I would probably have to go with Druple.  Sure the templates aren’t as showy as Joomla, but the real intent for a research collaborative community is to get good clear information out there.   Druple is used by Adobe, the United Nations, and a host of others as their CMS systems of choice.   There is a reason.   It’s simple to use, and it works.

Drupal spiders easily.   It allows for multiple blogs, and a forum.   I found it to be much more intuitive to use then Joomla without having to use a lot of suspicious looking third party components to get it to do what I wanted.

Conclusions

1. Joomla – Looks flashy, but that’s about it.   Not that easy to use, and doesn’t spider well.   Be prepared to be bewildered on the components and modules, and where your content is going.   Templates difficult to work with, and not very sophisticated in terms of quality design.   Be prepared to be disappointed when trying to massage your information inside someone else’s template.   Things can go terribly wrong fast – without any real show of  support  even though you’ve  paid the template provider.

2. Wordpress – Very easy to use, extremely easy to spider.   Even my 69 year old mother uses it.    Google realizes when you have a Wordpress blog installed and will come by very often to pick up your new information.   In fact, I’ve noticed within 15 minutes information is being posted up on Google. Would have to open up comments though for collaboration.   Leaves door open for spam then.   Thousands of templates to choose from that are free.  Google doesn’t like it if you don’t regularly feed your blog with content, and I mean just about every other day.

3. Wikimedia – Fairly easy to use.   Comfortable format for people.   Easily spidered.   Good for collaborative work. Translates to different languages quite easily.   Can customize the look with style sheets.   Not as flashy, but doesn’t matter if you are just trying to provide good usable, clean information.

4. Drupal – Straightforward.   Good for community building.   If you are a designer, or an idea person but just not a programmer you can still get going pretty well.   Spiders  excellent.   Can have multiple blogs, and forums right off the bat.   Templates are ok, and can still customize if you understand PHP, or stylesheets.

References for better understanding:

Why use Drupal
Download Wikimedia
Joomla vs Drupal

Google Talk Impementing Drupal:

Wiki Etiquette: byRachael King, Business Week (2007)

DO
1. Be bold: Go ahead and create content or edit someone else’s work. Wikis develop faster when people fix problems, correct grammar, add facts, etc. This is a collaborative tool, after all.

2. Make notes: If you make changes, explain why you made those changes in the discussion or notes pages that are generally attached to wikis.

3. Give praise: Has someone added useful content to the page or spent a great deal of time cleaning up the page so it’s easier to read? Praise helps let people know their contributions are valued €”and makes them want to contribute again.

4. Build structure: Wikis need people to synthesize and structure content so it’s easy to read. Even if you’re not creating content, you can still help by shaping what’s already there.

5. Be polite: As with e-mail and instant messaging, it’s often easy to misinterpret the tone of a comment. Disagreements over content or edits can become heated. If that’s the case, it’s a good idea to take a break for a day or two and come back to it later.

DON’T
1. Take it personally: Yes, colleagues will edit your work and you might not agree with every change, but that’s the nature of collaboration. It doesn’t mean that your co-workers dislike you or think you’re stupid.

2. Ignore questions: Colleagues may disagree with your changes and ask why you made them. If so, be prepared to give concrete reasons for your edits.

3. Delete useful content: Many times a posting can be improved by amending or editing it, but deleting content upsets people, and they may feel they’ve wasted their time.

4. Be chatty: A wiki shouldn’t be used as a chat room. Any discussions related to a wiki subject should take place on the discussion or talk page, not on the actual content page.

5. Keep it secret: If you find valuable content on your company’s wiki, tell others about it. Wikis benefit from a wide range of contributors.

References:
King, R. (2007). Wiki etiquette. Retrieved December 24, 2007, from http://www.businessweek.com/technology/ceo_tipsheet/2007_3.htm

Wikis: Wikis are evolving into the perfect collaborative tool for business and education. By now, nearly everyone has heard of, or used the famous “Wikipedia” that was launchedin 2001. But what you might not realize is that the open source power behind Wikipedia,is available toanyone. Forward thinkingbusinesses and schools are increasinglyutilizing wikis to create theirvery own collaborative resource sites.

Why usewikis?

1. Wikis are adaptable, searchable and easy to use.
2. They handle and organize a growing base of knowledge in a veryefficient and usablemanner.
3. Wikis allow for individuals to rapidlyco-construct knowledge in a free-form manner.
4. Wikis remove the chronological sortingbarriers that blogs have. (Latest postings always being postedfirst might not always be ideal.)
5. They can be password protected.
6. Information is set free and “democratized.”
7. Open source wikis are free for your use.
8. Depending on the type of wiki, they can be easily installed without programming experience.
9. Wikis can be installed on your own computer as an organizational tool.
10. Wikis can even be installed on thumbUSB drives and passed amongst the collaborators.

Here are some creative ideas for using Wikis that may help you in your business or educational environment.

Ideas for usinga Wiki in Business
(Wiki.com, 2007)

1. Project collaboration and brainstorming
2. Building a community of practice
3. Creating knowledge bases on specific topics
4. Writing documentation or FAQ’s
5. Creating specifications and architecture documents for software or other projects
6. Creating “How to Step by Step Explanations”
7. Planning and documenting events
8. Real time reports of conferences
9. Information and policies about a project
10. Developing best practices or patterns
11. Software testing and development
12. Meeting agendas and notes for organizations
13. Developing software features and other inventions
14. Solidifying an existing community through collaboration and increased connections
15. Discussing theories
16. Creating an easily searched Website with hyperlinks.

Ideas for Using Wikis in Education

1. Websites can easily be created and maintained by students separated by distance.
2. Provides a sense of community and central meeting groundfor online students to collaborate ideas.
3. Collaboratively constructing knowledgein a way that isengaging and motivating.
4. Assignments can be peer reviewed, and critiqued. Particularly writing assignments.
5. Group assignments can be easily organized, andbe a central point for documents, photos, media, etc.
6. Information is searchable.
7. Encouraging Parent – Teacher – Child communication.

History of Wikis

According to Wikipedia.org (2007), the first wiki was called the WikiWikiWeb. It was produced by Ward Cunningham in 1995. It was first only open to invited programmers, and its original intent was “to facilitate communication between software developers, and also to experiment with the new hypertext capabilities”.

According to Darryl Taft in his article written for e-Week.com(2006), Mr. Cunninghamhas said: “The power of collaborative development has only just begun to be realized, and open-source software will continue to spur more collaboration and more innovation.”

“I’m betting on open source being a big trend,” Cunningham said, chuckling at his understatement. “And it’s not just because of cost, but because of end-user innovation. No end user wants to be a programmer; they just want to get their jobs done,” he said. But more and more people with powerful tools and powerful languages will be able to work together to build better systems, he said.

“I think of software being a work €”very much like a wiki being a work €”where people see an area that’s weak and they make it stronger.”

Mary Joe Foley (2004) also interviewed Cunningham in 2004 for e-Week.com. In the interview she reports: “Cunningham emphasized the need for programmers to abandon the lone-wolf approach and instead work more collaboratively. He said the WikiWikiWeb is all about nurturing collaboration by allowing developers to elaborate when writing patterns or other pieces of software.”

Interested in reading more about WardCunningham’s work in his own words? Here is an interesting page written by him about the history of his wiki development.

Features of Corporate Wikis
Features of wikis specifically helpful to a corporation include: (Wikipedia.org, 2007)

1. Allow to glue information via quick-and-easy-to-create pages containing links to other corporate information systems, like people directories, CMS, applications, and thus build up knowledge bases.




2. Avoiding e-mail overload. Wikis allow all relevant information to be shared by people working on a given project. Conversely, only the wiki users interested in a given project need look at its associated wiki pages, in contrast to high-traffic mailing lists which may burden many subscribers with many messages, regardless of relevance to particular subscribers.




3. Access rights, roles. Users can be forbidden from viewing and/or editing given pages, depending on their department or role within the organization.




4. Building consensus. Wikis provide a framework for collaborative writing. Particularly, they allow the structured expression of views disagreed upon by authors on a same page.




5. Organizing information. Wikis allow users to structure new and existing information. As with content, the structure of data is sometimes also editable by users; see structured wiki.




6. Saving time by: Making ideas available; Sharing Knowledge, Having a common glossary, and Managing Related Information. Sometimes used is “If you do not know where to put the information, put it in the wiki”.




7. Convert informational “noise” into corporate wisdom.

Corporate Wiki Solutions
Wikipedia.org (2007):

A large set of corporate wiki solutions are available; see list of wiki software and comparison of wiki software. Wikis with the required feature set include TWiki, MoinMoin, XWiki, TikiWiki, Confluence and Socialtext. Their aim is to provide all ranges of companies with ready-made wiki solutions that can be adapted to SMEs as well as multinational corporations. Amongst those companies, the competition lies as much in corporate philosophy as in what the products look like. For example, MoinMoin and Socialtext value simplicity, where TWiki puts an emphasis on structured wikis where users can create wiki applications. Most of them have adopted an Open-Source mindset and allow developers or even users to create purposed applications.

Wiki software packages not specifically built for corporations are also used at the workplace, such as MediaWiki or DokuWiki. Although they can be used to build simple knowledgebases and internal websites, they often lack enterprise features such as fine grained access control, per page name space for attachments, or integration with other enterprise tools.

Let’s finish this posting with a sort of “campy” video on wikis vs blogs. Kennedy taking the position of wikis, and Nixon on blogs. (Be patient, the beginning skips a bit, but then the film runs smoothly.

2. Another Wiki Comparison Guide.

3. List of wiki software.

4. List of wikis written in a variety of languages.

5. Download MediaWiki: The Free open source software that powers Wikipedia.

6. Open Source Collaborative Software

7. Richardson, W. (2006). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful tools. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

8. Educause: Use of wikis in education – Podcast

Wiki Tools: One Page

• JotSpot Live
• Writeboard
• Writely
• RallyPoint
• Zoho Writer
• StikiPad

Full Web Site

• Helping Students Education 501(c)(3)
• Wetpaint
• JotSpot
• Atlassian Confluence
• MediaWiki
• SocialText
• JotBox Wiki appliance for large enterprises
• EditMe
• Trac Project tracking wiki
• Wikispaces aimed at social groups
• PBwiki
• SeedWiki
• Schtuff
• Instiki
• Wetpaint
• LauLima
  …………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

References

Wikia.com. (2007). Uses of a Wiki. Retrieved December 12, 2007, from http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Uses_of_a_wiki.

Foley, M. (2004). Father of the wiki talks programming practices. Retrieved December 18, 2007, from http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1684470,00.asp

Taft, D. (2006). Father of wiki speaks out on community and collaborative development. Retrieved December 18, 2007, from http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1939982,00.asp

Wikipedia.org (2007). Corporatewiki. Retrieved December 18, 2007, from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_wiki

Today we are awash in key worded blogs, RSS feeds and automated agents which seek out content based on our requirements, and bring it back to us on a regular basis.

But at the beginning of this millenium, the idea of pushing information to us rather than hunting for it was a brand new concept. In May 2001 Scientific American published an article entitled the “Semantic Web” by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila. At that time, I must confess to reading that particular article over and over, knowing intuitively somehow that it was very important for me to understand its message but not yet knowing how to apply it to my work in the Web. The most striking part of the article that left me spell bound was this quote:

Properly designed, the Semantic Web can assist the evolution of human knowledge as a whole.

This statement was quite profound and also foretelling. Read it again, absorb it, and you too will instinctively start to sense how important semantic applications really are.

Semantics according to Merriam-Webster (1986) originates from the Greek word semantikos. Semantics literally means: “significant, to signify, mean, or relating meaning in language. It is the study of meanings.” (Slightly digressing for your amusement, I find it ironic that I gathered this definition from my ancient print dictionary. I purchased it with the first $15.00 I ever made about a thousand years ago, during the age known as BTW = Before the Web.)

Ok back to learning…

The authors of the Semantic Web article; which include the originator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, spoke of how in the beginning Web pages were basically designed for people to read, but had no mechanism for computers to truly comprehend the content (Tim Berners-Lee et al., 2001 ). Of course, computers could scan Web page html to figure out the structure and layout of the page, and make some distinctions reading the header and title, but computer scripts couldn’t really understand or produce meaningful associations about the content on a Web page. In the beginning there was really no ability to actually “process the semantics.” Computers just DIDN’T GET IT yet. The capacity to know what they were processing or how to organize information based on the meaning just wasn’t there.

How does the Semantic Web work?

In order to make Web pages more palatable for machine consumption, we utilize markup languages like XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and RDF (Resource Description Framework) For example when a blog writer annotates their Web pages with tags, they may not realize it, but they are utilizing XML. Their tags are an indication of what the content is about.

XML is the way to exchange general purpose metadata. Therefore content can easily be detected by computer scripts which translate the tags and use them in a variety of ways, including organization. But even though XML can enable a user to give their own content definitions to documents it doesn’t quite get us to what the structures really mean. This is where RDF steps into play. RDF helps to express deeper meaning through a structure similar to the “subject, verb and object of an elementary sentence.” (Tim Berners-Lee et al., 2001)

Thanks a wonderfully written article by Altova (2007) we can gain some moreinsight on how the Semantic Web works.

In the Semantic Web data itself becomes part of the Web and is able to be processed independently of application, platform, or domain. This is in contrast to the World Wide Web as we know it today, which contains virtually boundless information in the form of documents. We can use computers to search for these documents, but they still have to be read and interpreted by humans before any useful information can be extrapolated. Computers can present you with information but can’t understand what the information is well enough to display the data that is most relevant in a given circumstance. The Semantic Web, on the other hand, is about having data as well as documents on the Web so that machines can process, transform, assemble, and even act on the data in useful ways.

Implementing the Semantic Web requires adding semantic metadata, or data that describes data, to information resources. This will allow machines to effectively process the data based on the semantic information that describes it. When there is enough semantic information associated with data, computers can make inferences about the data, i.e., understand what a data resource is and how it relates to other data.

The first step required for machines to understand data is to get that data into a uniform format, where, for instance, a field labeled “street” always has the same format and contains the same type of information, and so on. This type of functionality can be found today on Web sites that use forms that allow users to enter information and run a query, such as airline Web sites that allow visitors to search for and book flights based on a variety of criteria. However, considering the amount and variety of data available from different sources today, this method of data typing does not scale beyond very specific applications.

The next step towards the Semantic Web requires that data from multiple domains is classified based on its properties and its relationship with other data. This is where Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, RDFS, and OWL come in.

Resource Description Framework (RDF)
An official W3C recommendation, RDF is an XML-based standard for describing resources that exist on the Web, intranets, and extranets. RDF builds on existing XML and URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) technologies, using a URI to identify every resource, and using URIs to make statements about resources. RDF statements describe a resource (identified by a URI), the resource’s properties, and the values of those properties. RDF statements are often referred to as “triples” that consist of a subject, predicate, and object, which correspond to a resource (subject) a property (predicate), and a property value (object). Below is an example of an RDF statement in plain English:
[resource] [property] [value]
The secret agent is Niki Devgood
[subject] [predicate] [object]

Overall, RDFS is a simple vocabulary language for expressing the relationships between resources. Building upon RFDS is OWL, which is a much richer, more expressive vocabulary for defining Semantic Web ontologies.

Web Ontology Language (OWL)
OWL is a third W3C specification for creating Semantic Web applications. Building upon RDF and RDFS, OWL defines the types of relationships that can be expressed in RDF using an XML vocabulary to indicate the hierarchies and relationships between different resources. In fact, this is the very definition of “ontology” in the context of the Semantic Web: a schema that formally defines the hierarchies and relationships between different resources. Semantic Web ontologies consist of a taxonomy and a set of inference rules from which machines can make logical conclusions.

A taxonomy in this context is system of classification, such as the scientific kingdom/phylum/class/order/etc. system for classifying plants and animals that groups resources into classes and sub-classes based on their relationships and shared properties.

Since taxonomies (systems of classification) express the hierarchical relationships that exist between resources, we can use OWL to assign properties to classes of resources and allow their subclasses to inherit the same properties. OWL also utilizes the XML Schema datatypes and supports class axioms such as subClassOf, disjointWith, etc., and class descriptions such as unionOf, intersectionOf, etc. Many other advanced concepts are included in OWL, making it the richest standard ontology description language available today.

Semantic Web Present and Future
It’s important to note that implementation of RDF, OWL, and the Semantic Web as a whole will be a gradual process. Questions about what the Semantic Web is and how it can benefit businesses and individuals are similar to initial confusion about why we needed HTTP and the Web before “WWW” was a staple of our daily vocabulary. But considering how those technologies have proliferated, it’s likely that the Semantic Web vision is one that will be realized, even if it’s on a small scale initially.

Let’s close with a video of Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium describing his vision of the Semantic Web:

References
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Berners-Lee, T. Hendler, J., & Lassila, O. (May 2001). The Semantic Web: A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities.Retrieved December 2, 2007, from http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00048144-10D2-1C70-84A9809EC588EF21&catID=2

Altova.com (2007). What is the Semantic Web? Retrieved December 2, 2007, from http://www.altova.com/semantic_web.html

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Want to learn more?

W3C Semantic Web
Semantic Web Case Studies
W3C Semantic Webon XML-Tim Berners-Lee
The Semantic Web Road Map – Tim Berners-Lee
Info Mesh: Semantic Web
HP – Intro to Semantic Web Technologies
RDF Tutorial
Semantic Web in Breadth
W3C Semantic Web Presentation 2002
The Semantic Web is closer than you think- O’Reilly
Ontologies Come of Age – Stanford University – Deborah L. McGuinness

Today we are awash in key worded blogs, RSS feeds and automated agents which seek out content based on our requirements, and bring it back to us on a regular basis.

But at the beginning of this millenium, the idea of pushing information to us rather than hunting for it was a brand new concept. In May 2001 Scientific American published an article entitled the “Semantic Web” by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila. At that time, I must confess to reading that particular article over and over, knowing intuitively somehow that it was very important for me to understand its message but not yet knowing how to apply it to my work in the Web. The most striking part of the article that left me spell bound was this quote:

Properly designed, the Semantic Web can assist the evolution of human knowledge as a whole.

This statement was quite profound and also foretelling. Read it again, absorb it, and you too will instinctively start to sense how important semantic applications really are.

Semantics according to Merriam-Webster (1986) originates from the Greek word semantikos. Semantics literally means: “significant, to signify, mean, or relating meaning in language. It is the study of meanings.” (Slightly digressing for your amusement, I find it ironic that I gathered this definition from my ancient print dictionary. I purchased it with the first $15.00 I ever made about a thousand years ago, during the age known as BTW = Before the Web.)

Ok back to learning…

The authors of the Semantic Web article; which include the originator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, spoke of how in the beginning Web pages were basically designed for people to read, but had no mechanism for computers to truly comprehend the content (Tim Berners-Lee et al., 2001 ). Of course, computers could scan Web page html to figure out the structure and layout of the page, and make some distinctions reading the header and title, but computer scripts couldn’t really understand or produce meaningful associations about the content on a Web page. In the beginning there was really no ability to actually “process the semantics.” Computers just DIDN’T GET IT yet. The capacity to know what they were processing or how to organize information based on the meaning just wasn’t there.

How does the Semantic Web work?

In order to make Web pages more palatable for machine consumption, we utilize markup languages like XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and RDF (Resource Description Framework) For example when a blog writer annotates their Web pages with tags, they may not realize it, but they are utilizing XML. Their tags are an indication of what the content is about.

XML is the way to exchange general purpose metadata. Therefore content can easily be detected by computer scripts which translate the tags and use them in a variety of ways, including organization. But even though XML can enable a user to give their own content definitions to documents it doesn’t quite get us to what the structures really mean. This is where RDF steps into play. RDF helps to express deeper meaning through a structure similar to the “subject, verb and object of an elementary sentence.” (Tim Berners-Lee et al., 2001)

Thanks a wonderfully written article by Altova (2007) we can gain some moreinsight on how the Semantic Web works.

In the Semantic Web data itself becomes part of the Web and is able to be processed independently of application, platform, or domain. This is in contrast to the World Wide Web as we know it today, which contains virtually boundless information in the form of documents. We can use computers to search for these documents, but they still have to be read and interpreted by humans before any useful information can be extrapolated. Computers can present you with information but can’t understand what the information is well enough to display the data that is most relevant in a given circumstance. The Semantic Web, on the other hand, is about having data as well as documents on the Web so that machines can process, transform, assemble, and even act on the data in useful ways.

Implementing the Semantic Web requires adding semantic metadata, or data that describes data, to information resources. This will allow machines to effectively process the data based on the semantic information that describes it. When there is enough semantic information associated with data, computers can make inferences about the data, i.e., understand what a data resource is and how it relates to other data.

The first step required for machines to understand data is to get that data into a uniform format, where, for instance, a field labeled “street” always has the same format and contains the same type of information, and so on. This type of functionality can be found today on Web sites that use forms that allow users to enter information and run a query, such as airline Web sites that allow visitors to search for and book flights based on a variety of criteria. However, considering the amount and variety of data available from different sources today, this method of data typing does not scale beyond very specific applications.

The next step towards the Semantic Web requires that data from multiple domains is classified based on its properties and its relationship with other data. This is where Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, RDFS, and OWL come in.

Resource Description Framework (RDF)
An official W3C recommendation, RDF is an XML-based standard for describing resources that exist on the Web, intranets, and extranets. RDF builds on existing XML and URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) technologies, using a URI to identify every resource, and using URIs to make statements about resources. RDF statements describe a resource (identified by a URI), the resource’s properties, and the values of those properties. RDF statements are often referred to as “triples” that consist of a subject, predicate, and object, which correspond to a resource (subject) a property (predicate), and a property value (object). Below is an example of an RDF statement in plain English:
[resource] [property] [value]
The secret agent is Niki Devgood
[subject] [predicate] [object]

Overall, RDFS is a simple vocabulary language for expressing the relationships between resources. Building upon RFDS is OWL, which is a much richer, more expressive vocabulary for defining Semantic Web ontologies.

Web Ontology Language (OWL)
OWL is a third W3C specification for creating Semantic Web applications. Building upon RDF and RDFS, OWL defines the types of relationships that can be expressed in RDF using an XML vocabulary to indicate the hierarchies and relationships between different resources. In fact, this is the very definition of “ontology” in the context of the Semantic Web: a schema that formally defines the hierarchies and relationships between different resources. Semantic Web ontologies consist of a taxonomy and a set of inference rules from which machines can make logical conclusions.

A taxonomy in this context is system of classification, such as the scientific kingdom/phylum/class/order/etc. system for classifying plants and animals that groups resources into classes and sub-classes based on their relationships and shared properties.

Since taxonomies (systems of classification) express the hierarchical relationships that exist between resources, we can use OWL to assign properties to classes of resources and allow their subclasses to inherit the same properties. OWL also utilizes the XML Schema datatypes and supports class axioms such as subClassOf, disjointWith, etc., and class descriptions such as unionOf, intersectionOf, etc. Many other advanced concepts are included in OWL, making it the richest standard ontology description language available today.

Semantic Web Present and Future
It’s important to note that implementation of RDF, OWL, and the Semantic Web as a whole will be a gradual process. Questions about what the Semantic Web is and how it can benefit businesses and individuals are similar to initial confusion about why we needed HTTP and the Web before “WWW” was a staple of our daily vocabulary. But considering how those technologies have proliferated, it’s likely that the Semantic Web vision is one that will be realized, even if it’s on a small scale initially.

Let’s close with a video of Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium describing his vision of the Semantic Web:

References
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Berners-Lee, T. Hendler, J., & Lassila, O. (May 2001). The Semantic Web: A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities.Retrieved December 2, 2007, from http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00048144-10D2-1C70-84A9809EC588EF21&catID=2

Altova.com (2007). What is the Semantic Web? Retrieved December 2, 2007, from http://www.altova.com/semantic_web.html

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Want to learn more?

W3C Semantic Web
Semantic Web Case Studies
W3C Semantic Webon XML-Tim Berners-Lee
The Semantic Web Road Map – Tim Berners-Lee
Info Mesh: Semantic Web
HP – Intro to Semantic Web Technologies
RDF Tutorial
Semantic Web in Breadth
W3C Semantic Web Presentation 2002
The Semantic Web is closer than you think- O’Reilly
Ontologies Come of Age – Stanford University – Deborah L. McGuinness

Visualcomplexity.com

One of the most visually stunning sitesone shall hope to see. The site is produced and maintainedby Manuel Lima who is an interaction designer, information architect and design researcher.Words cannot express the beauty contained within this work.

Complex Networks

Complexity is a challenge by itself. Complex Networks are everywhere. It is a structural and organizational principle that reaches almost every field we can think of, from genes to power systems, from food webs to market shares. Paraphrasing Albert Barabasi, one of the leading researchers in this area, “the mystery of life begins with the intricate web of interactions, integrating the millions of molecules within each organism”. Humans, since their birth, experience the effect of networks every day, from large complex systems like transportation routes and communication networks, to less conscious interactions, common in social networks.

Contained within you shall see information designed and categorized by:

Profound. Compelling. Inspiring.

Information R/evolution by MWesch.

This video will have you rethinking how information can be stored. Actually it cannot be stored in a physical sense anymore. Information is now beyond material constraints. Please do enjoy this wonderful piece.

Thisvideo explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique and share information. This video was started as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.