July 2008 Archives
The semantic web turned me into a flip-flopper. I’ve heard from both the positive and negative camps. The positive camp thinks the semantic web will revolutionize the web. The negative camp thinks the semantic web is nothing more than fancy metadata. I have yet to hear from anyone sitting in the middle. I think I might be the only one...
At first, I leaned toward the negative camp. I wasn’t seeing any real applications and the conferences I attended didn’t help much. Then came along SearchMonkey and OpenCalais and I was square in the positive camp. I officially flip-flopped and I’m not ashamed to admit it.
While researching SearchMonkey, I was led to Swoogle. I became excited about Swoogle for a couple of reasons: 1. It is a semantic search engine; 2. It came out of my alma mater, UMBC. I was thrilled to learn that my medium-sized, liberal arts school grew up to be an Honor’s University researching semantic web technologies. I felt like I just reconnected to one of my former lives…
That reconnect was quickly lost. After reading the multitude of web pages that discuss Swoogle, I found a web page that states the project ended in December 2006. Was Swoogle a victim of being ahead of its time? Did it fail? I have no idea because no one from Swoogle replied to my inquiry. I tried contacting a Swoogle researcher and was rewarded with silence. What happened to Swoogle? I started slowly leaning back to the negative camp.
And then along comes CrunchBase, who released what some have called an “awesome API.” I learned about the CrunchBase API from reading a blog post with the title, “Semantic Web by Example.” A title like that always catches my attention. As I’ve said before in this blog, we need more examples of semantic web technologies. And it looks like developers are heeding the call.
I’ve decided to ride the semantic web fence. Where do you side with semantic web technologies? Are you in the positive camp or the negative camp? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Setting the legal nuances of the chosen open source license aside, wouldn't two products under any open source license have the same claim to the open source moniker? Maybe so technically, but for many engineers who contribute to the development of open source projects, like Linux Foundation Chief Platform Strategist Ted Ts'o, there's much more to the open source designation than just the license.
Borrowing the Mozilla term "organic," which describes a development process that draws upon the contributions of a diverse developer community and many different companies, Ts'o draws a distinction between organic open source and non-organic open source. Ts'o explained this distinction to me as he headed to the airport for a flight to Portland, Oregon, where he's attending the OSCON show and participating in a panel discussion about this very issue.
According to Ts'o, the difference between organic and non-organic is related to how much influence a single corporation has in the development of an open source product. The broader the developer community around a project and the lower the barrier to contributing, the more organic it is. Citing Linux, Apache, Mozilla, and Eclipse among those in the organic open source camp, Ts'o singled out OpenSolaris as a prime example of non-organic open source. In fact, he objected to "Sun claiming that Solaris is just like Linux because it's open source"--a characterization that seemed to inspire his interest in asserting these definitions.
Ts'o, an IBM employee, said 99 percent of OpenSolaris development comes from Sun engineers. He added that Sun has a "heavyweight development process" in place for OpenSolaris, in which Sun engineers must sponsor any individual contributions as well as shepherd submitted patches. "If you're not accepting patches from the outside world, you have to wonder whether things have really changed a lot since the Solaris 8 and 9 days [when a developer could purchase the operating system on a CD for $75]," said Ts'o.
Ts'o does concede that the organic/non-organic distinction is more of a business argument than a technical argument, even labeling the OpenSolaris 'just like Linux' message as marketing to young developers. He made no judgments about how a non-organic development process impacts the quality of the OpenSolaris end product. He did, however, praise the organic approach for its individual rather than corporate stance, which he believes nurtures a very broad developer community, shields the project from corporate upheavals such as layoffs--which in a non-organic project can lead to a debilitating loss of developers, and ensures that decisions are based on the project's best interests rather than market interests.
So depending on whom you speak to, a license alone doesn't determine open source. The development process--as well as the degree and ease of individual participation allowed--are just as important. And don't even bring "free" into the discussion: Do you mean free as in beer, or free as in speech ...
With last week's release of the 3G iPhone, things are really heating up in mobile software development. My inbox is flooded with announcements--Nokia going open source, Google phone rumors, Windows Mobile device releases. It's funny, but with these announcements comes a feeling of industry-wide willful ignorance and hypocrisy.
For instance, the entire industry has acknowledged that fragmentation has been and is a major problem (particularly for developers) within the mobile space, but this doesn't seem to be stopping anybody from developing proprietary solutions to the problem or fighting over market share. If fragmentation is such a problem for developers, how can all these companies be so busy developing software to help developers with fragmentation? Doesn’t fragmentation make *those* developers’ jobs difficult? Everyone wants to be the one who solves the problem, but each “solution” compounds the problem.
Perhaps most amusing is watching how the latest iPhone is struggling with some very Microsoft-esque problems--especially for existing iPhone customers. Sound like a Windows upgrade nightmare? Yep. I’m no fan of Microsoft per se, but does the fact that Apple is now experiencing these problems prove that absolute power *always* corrupts absolutely? Or does it just go to show that Apple was never that innocent to begin with?
When I started with DevX, I knew nothing of the Semantic Web and the technologies that surround it. As I researched the subject, I realized that while a segment of the developer community was heavily touting semantic technologies (ST), that everyday use was still three-quarters of a mile out of reach. One of the main issues surrounding ST is a lack of available functionality for the user. Sure, I’ve seen lots of examples, and lots of demos, but nothing grabbed me that made me say, this is way cool, this is something I could use. That is, until now.
Today, DevX posted an article by James Leigh that describes how to get started with OpenCalais and SearchMonkey. These tools offer functionality that could be used by developers and the public. The OpenCalais tool (OpenCalais 2.1 just went live), offers a means to create metadata that describes a document’s content. And who of us in this blogging world, who realizes that content is king, would not find something like that useful? Especially if it means that authors and editors no longer have to manually create metadata, and instead, a tool can extract it for us. To me, that’s awesome.
SearchMonkey, as we all know by now, can enhance how your site appears in search results. And who in this business-minded world does not want control of their marketing and branding; especially in a front-line environment like search engines? Stay tuned to DevX for an upcoming article from Peter Mika entitled, Semantic Search Arrives to the Web.
With the advent of Calais 2.1 and SearchMonkey, it appears that ST can become a must-have tool in a developer’s war chest. I encourage you to read James’ article and to research these tools more.
An interesting split is becoming obvious in computing today; older people (among them those who were instrumental in empowering computing and the modern web), are increasingly worried about privacy, while younger people (those who've been exposed both to the weband on it—for most of their lives) seem to be far less interested in privacy issues, tending to view the web as a vehicle for social interaction, even if that social interaction involves losing control of their personal privacy altogether.
This emerging difference becomes glaringly clear in the brief comments in this TechnologyReview.com article. For example, Mena Trott, president and cofounder of Six Apart in San Francisco, says: "With the popularity of blogging and online video and photo sharing, we already know that people want to publish significant portions of their lives online. In 10 years, I can easily see someone putting 75 percent of their day online. But it won't all be public."
In contrast, Bjarne Stroustrup, Professor at Texas A&M University and designer of the C++ programming language, says that within five or ten years we can expect "The total end of privacy. Governments, politicians, criminals, and friends will trawl through years of accumulated data (ours and what others collected) with unbelievably sophisticated tools. Obscurity and time passed will no longer be covers."
Even Richard Stallman, the foremost advocate of open source, isn't really interested in open-sourcing people's private data, saying: "I see a danger in the Web today: doing your computing on servers running software you can't change or study, and entrusting your data to U.S. companies required to give it to Big Brother without even a search warrant. Don't risk this practice!"
The problem, as I suspect many older people see it, is that collusion between businesses (those license agreements that give businesses the right to have "associated businesses" access your data) and between businesses and government effectively makes a lie out of assurances such as Trott's that "it won't be all public." The opposite of public is "private," but what is private when ISPs and governments can search through every request, every post, every email, every IM transmission, and every digital phone conversation you have? Is it private just because your neighbors and friends can't see it? Ben Franklin wrote: "Three may keep a secret, if two are dead." That statement's just as true today as it was when Franklin wrote it. Do you really trust people with your private information? If so, why? People with access to secrets not only tend to misuse them, but also share them with others. Even at the business level, recent research suggests that a large number of those with access (network administrators) look at information they're not supposed to be viewing.
It's bad enough when you first truly understand that your recent data is not private. But now, imagine a world in which every faux pas you've ever committed can be discovered, resurrected and perhaps used against you.
Remember when you once posted those pictures of you at that graduation party in Maui? Now you're applying for a job at a company owned by a conservative Christian business network. Too bad. Rejected.
Remember that IM conversation you and your buddy had one evening about your career choices, where you said you never wanted to get put into the position of having to fire large numbers of employees? Now you're up for a promotion, but you have to be willing to wield the corporate axe. Oops, guess you won't get it.
The plain and simple fact is that there is no real privacy in digital data. There never was any complete and total privacy, of course, but there was a strong probability of privacy, because private data was difficult to access and search. Most paper-based data was filed in a single location, and access was typically restricted to people with good reasons to look. Even published information reached only subscribers, or those willing to spend the time manually scanning library copies. Moreover, much private data simply disappeared after a period of time. Records of childhood legal infractions were sealed. Financial records were destroyed after seven years. People threw away letters when you were no longer a part of their lives. And some communications were too difficult to monitor. Phone calls from public telephones were essentially anonymous. Conversations with a journalist were once considered unassailably private. None of that is true any longer—Stroustrup is correct in saying that obscurity and time passed will no longer be covers. The things you say, the places you go, the items you buy, the food you eat, the pages you visit—these combine to create an electronic trail that employers, governments, businesses, or any sufficiently interested and well-financed person can use to discover things about you that you might not want known.
When confronted with this fact, the enemies of privacy typically argue that there's no reason to hide anything you've done unless you've done something wrong that others should know about; that hiding information is tantamount to lying, and that in this age of terrorism, everyone has a right to know everything about you, particularly your government. That argument should sound familiar to those who remember the 1950's witchhunts.
But being able to outlast every tiny personal truth gives you the ability to become the person you'd like to be, rather than the person you were in the past. Americans have long believed in (or at least given lip service to) second chances. We love hearing about the gang member who gets his GED in prison, and goes on to become a successful business executive. We love stories about the prostitute with a heart of gold who marries the millionaire.
Conversely, the inability to obscure every tiny personal fact can make you now and forever the least appealing person you've ever been. The one who gave into temptation, who stole, lied, cheated—who failed in some way, perhaps even in a way that, at the time, wasn't considered a failure. For example, you might have voted for the "wrong" person for President, and mentioned it to your mother in an email, or written it proudly on your FaceBook page. A partisan administration might hold that against you.
On the other hand, perhaps most humans can see beyond the peccadilloes of people's pasts—particularly when their own mistakes are equally open to scrutiny. Perhaps the stigma of indiscretions currently held private will disappear, when it's no longer possible to hide them. Perhaps the total honesty engendered by "life searching" will create better, or at least more tolerant people. (I'm skeptical myself, but one can always hope.)
So is this generational divide in the approach to privacy due to accumulated wisdom, or is it due to aging pessimism? What do you think?
