The bright future of Semantic Web

Semantic Web is a nascent vision of Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the WWW and the director of the W3C, which was first mentioned in 1999 by Berners-Lee but properly unveiled in 2001 in the “Scientific American” magazine by Berners-Lee and colleagues.

Semantic Web is a component of ‘Web 3.0′ and is a vision of information that is understandable by computers so that they can find, combine and act upon information on the Web. It is not a replacement for the WWW but rather an enhancement or an extension which gives the WWW a greater utility by allowing people to share content beyond the boundaries of applications and websites.

In essence, the technologies that would make the Semantic Web vision come true include:

1. a common language for representing data that could be understood by different types of software agents
2. ontologies that translate information from disparate databases into common terms
3. rules that allow software agents to reason about the information described in those terms.

The Semantic Web adheres to the W3C standards and the W3C has already released appropriate languages and technologies [Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL), etc.] to provide an environment for accessing data from diverse sources, integrating that data, querying it and drawing inferences using vocabularies. For example, RDF and OWL are used to create vocabularies, taxonomies and ontologies, which are stored in RDF repositories, while SPARQL is emerging as a query language for RDF data.

As different Semantic Web software tools are constantly being development, the principles of the Semantic Web have already been employed in the tagging systems that have flourished on the Web including delicious, digg and the DOI system, and in custom tags available on social networking sites such as Flickr and MySpace. There is also a healthy industry growing around the Semantic Web including:

• startups (Top Quadrant, C&P, Talis, Zepheira, Cambridge Semantics, Garlik, OpenLink, iSOCO, Franz Inc., Sandpiper, Aduna, Faviki, Twine, etc.)
• big corporations offering tools (IBM, Oracle, HP, Adobe, Profium, etc.)
• other companies using it in some way or other (Novartis, Sun, Eli Lily, EDF, Yahoo!, Google, FAO, Bankinter, etc.)

The future of the Semantic Web seems promising as, according to Gartner report from May 2007, “by 2012, 15% of public Web sites will use more extensive Semantic Web-based ontologies to create semantic databases (0.6 probability)”. However, Wikipedia lists some of the major challenges for the Semantic Web including vastness (48 billion pages on the WWW), vagueness (imprecise concepts like “young” or “tall”), uncertainty (precise concepts with uncertain values), inconsistency (logical contradictions) and deceit ( intentional misleading between the producter and the consumer of the information).

Only the time will show how successful the vision of the Semantic Web really is!

EventManager case study appears in the newest Taschen book

A case study of Kent House’s proprietary event management software, EventManager, has been featured in the latest Taschen book titled “The Internet Case Study Book”. As most of Taschen’s technology-oriented books, this book has also been published by ‘one of the best, if not the best, surfer of the web’, Julius Widemann, in collaboration with Rob Ford.

“The Internet Case Study Book” features 60 success stories from clients’ briefings to final projects divided into five chapters: Campaigns, E-Commerce, Promotional, Social Media and Corporate. Kent House’s EventManager case study appears in the “Corporate” chapter on pages 366-369. This book will be available for purchase from April 2010 but you can have a look at the online version of this book and the case study of our software product here.

The almighty iPad

So, the latest creation of Apple and the most anticipated device since the iPhone, a touchscreen tablet dubbed the iPad, has been revealed. Steve Jobs, the company’ CEO, revealed it at a press conference in San Francisco in late January and said that “it’s so much more intimate than a laptop and so much more capable than a smartphone with this gorgeous, large display”. Rumor has it that Jobs has even said the iPad “will be the most important thing I’ve ever done.”

In a nutshell, iPad is 9.56 inches (242.8 mm) hight, 7.47 inches (189.7 mm) wide and all of its built-in apps take advantage of multi-touch screen and work in any orientation. It can be used for browsing webpages, doing e-mail, organising calendar and contacts, writing notes, enjoying and sharing photographs, watching videos, listening to music, playing games and reading e-books, etc. It has maps application, satellite view, the App Store, the iTunes Store and Spotlight Search for searching across iPad and all of its built-in apps, etc. The starting price of this new gadget is $499 (approximately £325) and the shipping of Wi-Fi and 3G models will start in late March.

Many book publishing companies, such as Taschen in which books Kent House published some of our finest brand identity logos and the EventManager case study, are taking the new iPad in their stride and are expanding their digital media departments in order to digitise all their books for the iPad. It looks like Taschen is one of those companies that can quickly adopt to new technology and change.

Google for some time now has wanted to create the world’s largest online library but recently it got into copyright monopoly trouble with US authors and publishers and several organisations including Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo!. I just wonder how soon Apple with its iPad and e-book concepts will get drawn into the Google book fight…

Apple touchscreen tablet: technology’s worst-kept secret

Apparently, in two days’ time (on Wednesday the 27th of January 2010), at a press event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco, Apple is going to launch a brand new touchscreen tablet. Last week the company sent out a broad and vague — “come see our latest creation” invitation to the press. According to Steve Jobs, Chief Executive of Apple, the tablet is going to reshape books, newspapers and television businesses much the way the iPod revamped the music industry.

Although no concrete facts about the existence of Apple tablet (quite possibly ‘iTablet’ or ‘iSlate’) have been leaked to the press, at least apart from what is reported by The Wall Street Journal, all sorts of rumours have been spread all over the Internet. For example, Wired speculates that the tablet will serve as an e-reader for magazines, newspapers and books, but it will also offer the general-purpose functions seen in the iPhone, such as gaming, viewing photos, web surfing and using apps. Its appearance is described as a 10- to 11-inch iPhone or iPod Touch, it will run a substantially expanded version of the iPhone OS, it will have a new non-QWERTY interface and it will support Wi-Fi and and 3G data connections just as do the iPhone, iPod Touch and all Macs. Also, the presumption is that Apple will sell access to book, newspaper and magazine content via iTunes.

The cost of Apple’s new creation is evaluated to range from as low as £300 to as high as £1250, with most speculation focusing on the £500 to £600 range. The tablet is supposed to fill in the price gap between the iPod Touch (£250) and the lowest-priced MacBook (£650).

At least in the US, prognosticators believe the tablet will be supported by AT&T and Verizon networks. It is presumed that there may be two devices, one with the HSPA+ processor designed for AT&T and the other one with EVDO processor designed for Verizon, or quite possibly the tablet will be equipped with the Qualcomm processor which allows to connect with any network.

Following the release pattern of the iPhone, which was unveiled by Steve Jobs in January 2007 but not sold until June that year, the tablet could also be sold around June time 2010 or maybe even earlier. But that is not the only thing the company is likely to announce. Updates to the MacBook line and the iPhone OS are also likely to be on the ticket. So, watch this space!

Sir Berners-Lee’s latest venture for the UK government

Today, BBC News informs us about a launch of a new website, data.gov.uk, which will give the public access to more than 2,500 sets of government-held non-personal data, ranging from traffic statistics, exam results, house prices, local amenities and services to crime figures. The primary objective of this site, as said by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, is to “unlock new ideas for delivering public services, help communities and society work better, and let talented entrepreneurs and engineers create new businesses and services”.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown appointed Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt from the University of Southampton in June 2009 to oversee this project and open up the official data to the general public. Sir Tim justified the launch of the new site to BBC News by saying that “Government data is something we have already spent the money on… and when it is sitting there on a disk in somebody’s office it is wasted”. Likewise, the third collaborator on this project, Stephen Trimms, Minister for Digital Britain, believes that data.gov.uk “is a tremendous opportunity for UK firms to secure better value for money in service delivery and to develop innovative services which will help to grow the economy”.

A beta version of data.gov.uk has been running since September 2009 and so far has been tested by more than 2,400 developers. Like the iPhone, the software for the site will be left as ‘open source’ so that people can develop applications for it. Currently, the site has 19 applications created using the data feeds, including ‘FillThatHole’ for reporting potholes across the UK, ‘mycounciltax.org.uk’ for finding out how much council tax you pay for your property and ‘UK House Prices’ for looking at property market trends using Land Registry data.

The creators of data.gov.uk work tirelessly with departments, agencies and local authorities to release even more data and add more functions to the site all the time. For example, one of the key data sets they are trying to include is geographical location from the Ordnance Survey (OS), which currently is only available free of charge to small-scale developers. It is planned that this data will be released to public from April 2010.

Others, including US President Barack Obama and London Mayor Boris Johnson, launched similar sites such as data.gov, which offers feeds from various departments including the US defence department and Nasa and an online data warehouse with more than 200 data sets relevant to life in the British capital.

Exclusively from Cambridge: Creating 3D models with a simple webcam

Yet another great discovery to join the University of Cambridge’s cabinet of fame as researchers at the Engineering Department created a program able to build 3D models of textured objects in real-time, using only a standard computer and webcam. Up to this point, the construction of virtual 3D models usually required heavy and expensive equipment, was time-consuming and complicated to use or inconvenient and the model was not built in real-time. The existing methods for capturing 3D models range from 2D/3D laser, (in visible spectrum or other wave lengths), scanner, projector, camera, etc. The data (for example laser information or photos) must first be acquired, before going through the lengthy reconstruction process to form the model. If the 3D reconstruction is unsatisfactory, then the data must be acquired again.

The new method for capturing 3D models needs only a simple webcam. The object is moved about in front of the webcam and the software can reconstruct the object “on-line” while collecting live video. The system uses points detected on the object to estimate object structure from the motion of the camera or the object, and then computes the Delaunay tetrahedralisation of the points (the extension of the 2D Delaunay triangulation to 3D). The points are recorded in a mesh of tetrahedra, within which is embedded the surface mesh of the object. The software can then tidy up the final reconstruction by taking out the invalid tetrahedra to obtain the surface mesh based on a probabilistic carving algorithm, and the object texture is applied to the 3D mesh in order to obtain a realistic model. Thanks to this simple and cheap system, 3D reconstruction can become accessible to everybody.

Demonstration of what the new 3D modelling method requires and how it should be used can be viewed here.

Exclusively from Cambridge: P3 – a new approach for supporting design process

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about DRed, a leading-edge software developed by researchers from the University of Cambridge for unobtrusively capturing, graphically presenting, and storing for future reuse, the rationale behind the day to day decisions of individuals or groups of designers. Today, I am going to look at P3 Signposting, which is a rich, graphical framework for manipulating and simulating Applied Signposting Models (ASMs) ranging from descriptive flowcharts used to capture expert knowledge through to executable models, in which parameters represent data files that are processed by tasks which drive execution of design codes. Similarly to DRed, P3 has been developed at the University of Cambridge by and it has been tested and used on daily basis by designers and engineers from a leading British aerospace organisation, in particular, Rolls-Royce Civil Aerospace.

The P3 software is aimed at companies which develop complex products/systems such as a gas turbine and may be used to model design processes at varying levels of abstraction. It can capture down to a very low level what is going on within a given product/system and yet package away all the core interactions between sub-processes. P3 is based on a graphical diagramming interface which should be familiar to users of standard office suites. It is intended to provide an alternative to general-purpose diagramming tools or spreadsheets and can be configured without programming to implement novel modelling frameworks.

In P3 diagrammatic models of any type are comprised of worksheets, nodes and node ports, edges and constraints:

1. Worksheets. Each worksheet may contain multiple nodes and edges. Worksheets may be to split a large model for easier navigation and printing (for graphical reasons) and to give different meaning to sections of the model. Multiple worksheets may be created and may optionally be nested within one another.
2. Nodes and node ports. Each node on a worksheet is an instance of a particular class defined in the linkage meta-model. Model instances are referred to as elements and model classes are referred to as schemas. An element schema determines the data fields which are presented to the user to edit the properties of elements of that type. Element schemas also determine how nodes are rendered in the diagramming view, by combining simple geometric primitives which render rectangles, ellipses, text strings etc. Every element schema must also define one or more node ports. Each node port is a part of the node geometry which has a particular meaning in the modelling framework.
3. Edges. Edges connect one node port to another, either on the same node or on two different nodes. The type of an edge is determined by an edge schema defined in a similar way to element.

In addition to implementing the Applied Signposting approach, P3 allows rapid prototyping of other linkage-based modelling frameworks. A graphical configuration tool allows extension or re-definition of the modelling framework by declaring new element classes, properties, relations and perspectives.

P3 is a useful tool for designing products/systems during the design process and it has been successfully used in academia and industry for about 3 years and, since it is under active development, it includes an online update feature.

Exclusively from Cambridge: Royal guests and 800 years of the University of Cambridge

On the 19th of November 2009, I was invited by the Vice Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, Professor Alison Richard, to attend the opening of the Alan Reece Building at the developing science and technology campus in West Cambridge. This particular opening was special not only because it provided a £15m home to exceptional academics from the Department of Engineering’s Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) and it happened at the time when the whole of Cambridge is celebrating the 800th anniversary (1209-2009) of its famous University, but more importantly because the opening duties were performed by a man with a very long name – His Royal Highness Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh KG KT and Chancellor of the University of Cambridge (whom some of us warmly call ‘the King’). The leading British industrialist, Dr Alan Reece, the institute’s main benefactor was attending the event as a guest of honour.

Prince Philip was attending the IfM opening gala for about 45 minutes and during that time he spoke to a few Cambridge-bred engineers (among whom was James Moultrie – a winner of Scientific and Technical Oscar and an Emmy Award for work on a range of lenses for professional 35mm cinematography) and some undergraduate students. While waiting with 400 other guests (most of whom were incognito bodyguards) for Prince Philip to unveil the plague, I wondered whether he would say something controversial or inappropriate as he often did in the past. If he did make a comment that was not in line with the royal protocol, then it wouldn’t had been the first time that he got in trouble with the Cambridge folk. BBC reports that in 1999 Cambridge students accused the Duke of Edinburgh of racism and bigotry and campaigned to remove him from his position as university chancellor. But I was nicely surprised as Prince Philip was very charming and sweet and he made a little joke about how he officially opened the main side of the Department of Engineering in 1952 and has been given the task of opening things ever since. He smiled often and did not mind at all when myself and others endlessly blinded him with the camera flash.

Although Queen Elizabeth II was also in Cambridge at the time, she did not attend the opening gala at the IfM because she was busy with her formal visit to King’s College and the Senate House. Even if many people did not have the opportunity to see, speak to or take photos of the Queen and the Duke, the presence of these two members of the royal family was felt in the city because, in true royal fashion, one of the main roads in the city centre was closed for the day.

Don’t be fooled by Bots

Recently I received a few emails with comments about my blog articles. At first glance all emails looked like they contained genuine content, but shortly after I decided that they sounded a bit too generic for my liking so I googled the email address from which the comments were ‘apparently’ sent and came across the BotScout website, which confirmed my suspicion that the blog comments were sent by Internet bots. Interested in what bots are and how they operate, I decided to investigate this matter a bit further and in the process I found out the following…

Basically, bots (also known as web robots, www robots or simply bots) are automated web scripts which perform structurally repetitive tasks on the Internet at a much higher rate than a human would do. For example, bots are often used to register on forums, pollute databases, spread spam, and abuse forms on websites. More malicious bots are used to coordinate and operate an automated attack on networked computers, such as a denial-of-service attack by a botnet. Jeremy Linden, a researcher at Arbor Networks, believes that almost every major crime problem on the Internet can be traced to bots, for example bots are often used to monitor keystrokes to collect passwords and other sensitive data for identity theft and credit card fraud. While David Dagon, a PhD student from Georgia Tech, says that networks of bots distribute as much as 90% of all junk emails (see “Wired” for more details).

A standard procedure for protecting yourself from unauthorised intrusion is to firewall your network and use antivirus programs. Unfortunately, bots have the capacity to infiltrate even protected computers and they can even pose a bigger threat than virulent malware such as the famously destructive ‘Melissa’, ‘I Love You’, and ‘Slammer’ viruses.

But bots are not always bad. In fact, they are commonly used to play games, report weather, provide zip-code information and sports scores, convert currency or other units and manage Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels such as AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger. However, as one of “Wired” articles says “little by little the term is losing its neutrality, and the phrase malicious bot is becoming redundant”.

Internet is part of everyday life for young people

Apparently, 75% of people from the 16-24 age group couldn’t live without access to the Internet. This statistic comes from the report published recently by online charity YouthNet, which runs websites offering advice, information and volunteering opportunities to young people. The surveyed young adults even admitted that they prefer to use online resources in order to seek for advice rather than speak about their problems with a professional. This survey also reveals that despite different dangers of the Internet such as phishing email scams, young people generally perceive Internet as safe as long as one knows what they are doing. However, the YouthNet charity believes that older adults need to become more Internet-savvy in order to be more aware about what younger people are doing online.

So, it comes as no surprise that younger adults worship the Internet and cannot live without it as they have grown up with computer and mobile technology and generally understand it better than older generations. But what is the Internet adoption rate among older adults? Well, the BBC reports that in 2006 the UK government has signed up to an EU agreement to halve the gap in internet use for older adults, by 2010. There is still one more year left before we see the official results of this endeavour, but the future seems promising as, according to the Office for National Statistics, since 2006 4 million new households in the UK started using the Internet contributing to a total of 18.3 million households with Internet access in 2009. Also, the findings of a web watch conducted in 2003 by silicon.com show that the number of older adults using the Internet is steadily growing with the UK having the second highest proportion in Europe. Research by Nielsen shows that older people are one of the fastest growing demographics on the Web as 11.5 million people aged 55 and over use the internet in Europe.

Older generations are typically much slower at using new technology and some of the reasons for slower Internet adoption rates among older adults include unfamiliarity, fear, lack of skills, missing background knowledge, lack of perceived benefit from the net and unusable devices (Melenhorst, Rogers and Caylor, 2001).

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