Harry Halpin
<hhalpin -(a)- ibiblio.org>
University of Edinburgh, W3C Semantic Web Co-ordination Group
The Web is not about replicating human intelligence. The Semantic Web is about augmentation and so "keeping humans in the loop."
Man's population and gross product are increasing at a considerable rate, but the complexity of his problems grows still faster, and the urgency with which solutions must be found becomes steadily greater in response to the increased rate of activity and the increasingly global nature of that activity....
by "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble.
Increasingly all data is on the Web: a universal information space
The "Web 2.0" is the use of the Web as a platform for applications that enables a more radically democratic and participatory Web
What is the break point for the full realization of the Web?
Web Science Research Initiative brings together computer scientists, sociologists, entrepreneurs, and government representatives to do multidisciplinary research body to examine the World Wide Web.
In contrast to previous hypertext systems ranging from Nelson's Xanadu to Dexter, the Web succeeded because it let users link to other sites without a centralized link database, and had a low-barrier of entry via HTML and HTTP.
Originally, difficult to create web-pages, but sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Myspace allow people to easily create homepages and links.
Wikis and blogs allow users to easily create content, Flickr lets users easily add photos, and del.icio.us and other tagging systems lets users organize their own Web data
The Web 2.0 is the historic moment when everyone can make content for the Web
Without a centralized link database, one had to be created post-hoc by search engines.
Google has co-operated with China as regards censoring, concerns over privacy via their persistent cookies.
Google Maps, Google Spreadsheet, GoogleDocs...who do you trust with your data? Why can't we all control our own data in a decentralized manner?Google's openSocial is dependent on Google hosted technology, whose ToS including adding Google ads, and using ties Google into your application - is this an open standard ?
Why open-source behind closed servers?
Why not open source and open data for all?
A power-law is produced by any complex system consisting of decentralized agents.
More and more of the value of the Web is in the long tail. Between 40% and 25% of Amazon's ales come from the long tail Chris Anderson in The Long Tail
The way to build long-term growth and productivity is to focus on increasing productive relationships between membership of the long-tail.
Europe is already a long-tail based economy - 99% of the corporations in Europe are Small-and-Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) and 50% of the economic value of Europe.
Certainly not nepotism toward already large corporations who do not need government financing to start with, in order to "fight terror" or build the "next Google"
SME-based digital ecosystems will likely be applied with great success outside Europe as well - see work of Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. Addresses root causes of terrorism - i.e. poverty and inequality.
Will the European Union simply repeat the American Model?
Likely to fail - the venture capital phenomenon just does not exist in Europe.Paul Graham
Europe must do something different that capitalizes on its large, diverse, SME-based business eco-system via government-sponsored research and development.
The Digital Ecosystems wasn't included in WP2007-2008. Why?
The needs of businesses are much more complex than teenagers...
A host of new start-ups, including Metaweb's Freebase, Radar Network's Twine...
These start-ups exploit semantics and structured data.
Can Europe seize the lead of the next generation of the Web?
If we are committed to the process of collective intelligence, we will gradually create the technologies, sign systems, forms of social organization and regulation that enable us to think as a group, concentrate our intellectual and spiritual forces, and negotiate practical real-time solutions to the complex problems we must inevitably confront. We will gradually learn ... to collectively invent ourselves as a species.
Man has still within him sufficient resources to alter the direction of modern civilization, for we then need no longer regard man as the passive victim of his own irreversible technological development.
Earth from Space, Apollo 17, 1972
Man has still within him sufficient resources to alter the direction of modern civilization, for we then need no longer regard man as the passive victim of his own irreversible technological development.
Visualization of World Wide Web, by G. Laugehead