Tom Heath's Displacement Activities

I've just been having a play with Cuil. In general I really like it, particularly the richer layout. What is very weird (aka rubbish) though is the algorithm they're using to select images for display next to each result. A quick search for Talis shows some relatively sensible accommpanying images, although I'm not sure who the young guy with the beard is.

A bit of vanity searching though throws up all sorts of weirdness. This time who is the old dude with the beard known as 303 See Other? He looks kind of familiar, but there's no way it's me. And who's the other young guy with the whispy chin hair, and why is he squatting on my publications page? I like the juxtaposition of Linked Data and the Killer App image, but why? There seem to be far too many false positives, so come on Cuil, up the confidence threshold slightly.

Tomorrow, Wednesday 13th Feb 2008 11:30am UK time, iand will be giving a talk at KMi, my home prior to joining Talis. The talk will be titled "The Talis Platform: A Generic Infrastructure for Next Generation Web Applications" and will be publicly Webcast at that location - a great opportunity to drop by and hear about the Platform "from the horse's mouth". The ongoing programme of Webcast seminars from KMi is always available at http://stadium.open.ac.uk/podium/

In my recent Talk with Talis podcast, Paul Miller and I got chatting about the conceptual difference between exposing data on the web using Web2.0-style APIs (such as Amazon), and serving up Linked Data (also look here for TimBL's original Design Issues document, which spells out what must rapidly be becoming "the four commandments of Linked Data"). The discussion centers around the "On the Web, but not In the Web" distinction. Kingsley liked the discussion, and suggested it should be blogged for posterity, so here is a transcribed excerpt (starting at 28m41s through the podcast):

Paul Miller: You said that reviews you put into Revyu.com are available on the web as a normal review, and also available on the Semantic Web, to be embedded in other places. Now, how is that different to me doing a review on Amazon, and cutting and pasting it and sticking it into epinions, or my blog, or whatever?

Tom Heath: OK, so, if you do the review in Amazon it will be available on the Web in two ways. It'll be available on the HTML Web for people to browse with their browser, and the review would also be available through the Amazon Web Services API, which means that it is reusable to an extent: I can query the Amazon Web Services API and retrieve that information and do something with it. But this kind of highlights a really key distinction between Web2.0 APIs and the Semantic Web, or the Web of Data, or the Linked Data Web, or however you choose to name it, in that by default if you write a review in Revyu then it's there available, it has a URI, people can make other statements about it, they can reference it in other RDF statements on the Semantic Web, and they can also link to it from the HTML Web.

So, in contrast, if you write a review in Amazon, then the ability to link that review with other bits of information is very limited. You can't necessarily easily say that the review references a certain item or is provided by a certain person, in any way other than embedding this information in XML elements within the results from the Amazon Web Services API. So, this information is available on the Web, but it's not really in the Web, if that distinction makes sense.

It's a distinction that Tim Berners-Lee has, um, well I'm not sure if he's explicitly made the distinction but he always uses the phrase "in the Web" and I never really understood, I never really got why he was using this form of words until recently, when it dawned on me that something being on the Web doesn't really make it in the Web, and I think that's the key distinction between data from Amazon, the Amazon API, or any of the the other Web2.0 kind of APIs, that it's there available on the Web but it's not really in the Web, because it's hard to link it together, which is something that RDF does very well, which XML doesn't really do.