Solving the identity crisis

Will the large scale Semantic Web ever happen? As in a significant portion of the web explicitly annotated with classes, taxonomies, properties, even microformats? I'm not holding my breath, and a lot of implicit webbers with me.

Just consider how hard it is to design a sound ontology. How much harder it is to standardize on one ontology. Or to map between ontologies. Then imagine how all web publishers are going to deal with those issues. Hundreds of millions of them, including you and me.

Implicit webbers don't wait for publishers. We like shallow taxonomies and we guess if we need to. And of course we'll accept any help we can get, even if it's labeled "semantic web".

Some of that help may come from OKKAM. These people seem to have found a tractable corner of the Semantic Web. Here's my take on their recipe:

• Forget about classes, taxonomies, properties and description logics and build a service for just identity -- a taxonomy doesn't get flatter than that.
  
• Create a unique ID for Jasper Kamperman. Resist the temptation to classify him as a Person, Male, Musician, Dutchman, Sunnyvale-dweller, Computer Scientist, Openwater Architect. Don't try to maintain his current phone number, address or affiliation. Don't send him email to "update his ecard".
• But do record that jasper@cwi.nl, jasper.kamperman@cwi.nl, jasper.kamperman@idr.nl, jasper.kamperman@reasoning.com, jasper.kamperman@intel.com, Jasper F. Th. Kamperman, Jasper Kamperman, PhD, http://www.linkedin.com/in/jasperk64 , jasperk64 at yahoo dot com, and jasper dot kamperman at openwaternet dot com all refer to the same entity.

The result is a unique ID for each entity and a large set of clues that helps us make the right guess.

I wonder if or when they'll have an OpenSocial adapter .. imagine the possibilities!

Along came the Implicit Web

A conference about the implicit web inspired me to finally start this blog. The concept isn't very well defined yet, but then again, how much fun would that be?

"Implicit Web" caught my attention because it captures so well what we're doing at Openwater -- building service networks that connect people and information to create better service.

And right there you have an example; how do you know if service is better? That's simple, you conduct a survey. Or do you? Well, I don't know about you, but personally, I detest surveys. And I get really mad at software like WebEx's Meeting Manager that insists on a survey after every single meeting. And rating those movies on Netflix gets old quickly, too. Surveys are annoying exactly because they require you to be explicit.

So how about analyzing service network activity and creating implicit measures of quality?

Take online forums: How long does it take for a question to get an answer? Is it really an answer? How many people read that answer? How many people link to it? Does anyone write "thank you"? Do they come back?

Or take a technique called Search Analytics, explained eloquently here by Gery Angel. How often do users type slight variations of a search query? How many queries return any results at all? Do users click the first, the second or the third search result?

There are endless possibilities in measuring service quality alone, which in itself is only a small but necessary part of what we do. Which brings me back to the reason for starting this blog -- "implicit web" seems to cover a whole swath of subjects we're working on at Openwater. Stay tuned for more.