The Return of the Prodigal Web

Carole GobleInformation Management Group

The University of Manchester, UK

carole.goble@manchester.ac.uk

2

The Return of the Prodigal Me

Semantic Web

E-Science(life science)

Distributed Computing

Hypermedia

Web Accessibility

Hypertext?

Web?

Hypertext?

4

What’s the Story?• Hypertext, and its offspring the Web, envisioned

collective intelligence.• Both propose technical infrastructure and social

infrastructure to do this.• The Web “made riotous living”.• Two evolutions of the Web – Web 2.0 and Semantic

Web – could (potentially) return the Web to the Hypertext family. By stealth.

• We have applications that show this.• “We should make merry, and be glad”.• How? Is it done? Lessons learned? Why bother?

5

Spot the Difference Competition

• The Return of the Prodigal Web, Carole Goble

• Back to the Future with Hypertext: A Tale of Two or Three Conferences, Wendy Hall

• Back to the Future: Hypertext the Way It Used To Be, Ted Nelson and Robert Adamson Smith 

• Hypertext Tragedy,  A Panel

Is Simon trying to tell us something?

Back in the Day

Or Back to the Future….

7

Xanadu: a system in which it will be possible to store anything that anybody has ever written (or photographed or filmed) that can connect any piece of information to any other piece of information

Augmentation of the human intellect.

“ Adequately equipped with machines which leave him free to use his primary attribute as a human being – the ability to think creatively and wisely, unencumbered by unworthy tasks – man can face an increasingly complex existence with hope, even with confidence.”

“the interaction between person and hypertext could be so intuitive that the machine-readable information space gave an accurate representation of the state of people's thoughts, interactions, and work patterns, then machine analysis could become a very powerful management tool, seeing patterns in our work and facilitating our working together through the typical problems which beset the management of large organizations.”

A universal medium for

harvesting and harnessing collective intelligence

making and using connections between

decoupled content and decoupled people.

9

How? Hypermedia

• Systems that present the same media (text) in multiple CONTEXTS

• Systems that enable the communication of RELATIONSHIPS between documents

Frank Shipman

10

Technical Infrastructure– Management of nodes and

links and anchors.– Combining and aggregating

content and structure.– Architectures and models for

these connections.

Social Infrastructure– Authoring.– Navigating and Finding.– Making connections between people

and content.– DIY content aggregation.– Adaptation. Reuse.

11

Build Hypermedia

Create Content and Connections

Cruise it. Use it.

12

It’s the LINK, baby• LINKs as first class citizens• Embedded and non-embedded LINKing

• LINK bases, open hypermedia

• LINK architectures and LINK models

• LINK typing, LINK properties

• Two way LINKing• LINK context, LINK filtering

• LINK trails, Computed LINKs• LINK management

• LINK behaviours, Dangling LINKs• LINK navigation, Adaptive LINKing

• Rhetoric of LINKS• LINK authoring• Reusing resources through different LINK sets.

• LINK foo. LINK bar.

14

Open ArchitecturesAnchor object

Link object

Anchor object

Node Object Node Object

Link Base

Link Service

My Favourite Application Your Favourite Application

17

Open Composite Models• High level

representation• Dynamic• Virtual• Reuse

• We would call this a mash-up aggregating content feeds today.

I’m sure Ted will tell you all about Transclusion.

19

Open Authoring• Reuse

– content for a different audience.

– adaptation of materials you don’t control

• Alternate paths• New paths• The annotation thang.• Fuzzy distinction

between authors and readers. Possibly.

Open

Well yes…but aClosed System mentality.

Come and look in MY system.Kind of assumption that content was limited and

controlled

Closed Authoring and Closed Architectures

21

The Web

22

TBL’s original LINK fest

1989

23

Simple Hypermedia• Simple.• Distributed.• Low barrier of entry• Network effect• Long tail

• Open Architecture• Robust. Don’t restrict,

fix! Cooperate, don’t control.

• Scalable.

24

Simple Hypermedia• Simple link types• Composite nodes• Virtualisation• Computed links

• All added in through rich browser and server technologies and applications.

• CMS

25

• Search • Composites • Virtual • Extensibility • Computation • Open Standards

• Versioning • Collaboration

Halasz’s Seven Issues

Browsers and AppsPortal Frameworks

CMS & EnterpriseServers

27

DLRScirca 1998

Publisherslinkbases

Peopledatabase

Keywordlinkbases

Proxy

Hyperlink

Agent

XLinklinkbases

User profiles

Person Agent

Citation Agent

Bibliographydatabase

IR AgentInverted

index

Ontology Agent

Web Browser

Web Server

Carr, Hughs, Hall, De Roure et al,

University of Southampton, UK

28

Do links appear? Sure!• Google rocks because of Links.

• XLink – but that never took off…..

• Open hypermedia in Content Management Systems on a big scale – Active Navigation - Dynamic Link Injection – Hyperwave - Collaborative Information Management”

• Web + Open Hypermedia is an extra layer of software engineering.

• Wikis

But lets face it, its still Node-CentricThere is no Link Model.

Makes Context and Management Harder.

Links are embedded in the Applications.

Captive in their systems.

No infrastructure outside the application or the browser.

No Third Party Link Authoring (except shared bookmarking)

User participation is Reader Participation.

30

The Parting of the Ways…

The Web “made riotous living”

33

Hypermedia on the Web.

Versioning. Collaboration.Links. No Link Model outside the wiki.

34Collective Intelligence

• O’Reilly Publishing 2005ish.• Bottom Up & Emergent.• A collection of in use memes,

patterns and practices.• A mind set. A Marketing tool.• Web as platform.• User participation.• Content aggregation and

generation.• Hackability and remixability.• Hype – yes.• Substance – yes.

37

Web is a Platform

38

Web as Programming Platform.• Perpetual Beta.• Cooperate, Don't Control.• Design for Mash-ups, hackability,

remixability. Syndicate Content. • Web Services. Standards. Protocols.• Collect the collective intelligence

The Social Web. • Long tail. Network effects by default.

Collective Intelligence.

• Users Add Value. DIY. Tagging. Blogging. Social Networking. Social Information. Social linking. Linking people. Content sharing.

• Unique content by people.• “Perpetual Beta” of syndicated content.

Adapted from Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 2005

40

41

Social Recommendations

Collaborative, Social Tagging

Collaborative, Social Bookmarking

Content Sharing

Application Execution

Mash–up hypertext

• Composites OUTSIDE the application and in the cloud.

• Rich User Experience

• Two way linking in blogs and wikis.

• Matt’s quote

45

• Google AdWords + Google Maps + hostip.info + Microsoft Virtual Earth + NASA + NOAA Weather Service + WeatherBug + Yahoo Geocoding + Yahoo Maps + Yahoo Traffic

47

The Hypermedia NodeWeb 1.0: HTML pages

served up then viewed

using a browser

• Read • Page• Static • Web Coders • Client/Server • Web Browser• Geeks

Web 2.0: Web pages plus other

content, shared (interactively) over the web. More like an application than a page

• Write & Contribute• Post• Dynamic• Everyone• RESTful Web Services• Browser, RSS Reader, App• Mass Amateurisation

From Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 2005

What’s this got to do with Hypermedia?

The Social Writingsharing of content and links.

The Infrastructure for Dynamic Hypertext.Content syndication IS computation in the Hypertext.

Mash-ups ARE composite hypermedia nodes.The Return to Reuse.

Link behaviour in the browser.Two way linking in wikis and blogs.

Link types by microformats. Javascript Libraries for multi-headed links etc.

Web 2.0Microformats AJAX, JSONTagging

CSS, XSLTXPointer, XML

Web 2.0REST, TaggingRSS, ATOM, APIsOpenID, Identity 2.0Ruby on Rails

50

Linking by FolksonomiesWords and Tags

Link Service

Link base

Document LinkedDocument

COHSE: Link Generator Over the Web

COHSE: Linking in the World Wild Web

COHSE: Linking in the World Wild Web

54

55

57

Mind the Gap! Linking is tags, APIs and browser

• Link model?– No information model and information integration

mechanism

• Tags and folksonomies - a bit hit and miss– Controlled vocabularies?– Back in the day we talked about Conceptual

Hypermedia Systems.

58

• Berners-Lee and Hendler vision• Top Down and Planned. • Research agenda for A.I. and

data management• An enrichment of the Web• Web as Knowledge Space.• Open Information Infrastructure• Universal medium for Information

exchange and fusion.• Semantic content aggregation,

integration and generation.• Machine participation.• Hype – yes.• Substance – possibly.

59

Web as Information Platform.• A Layered, Open Information Model • Mark-up and tagging framework.• Uniform Data Model.• Enriching Knowledge Model.• Self-describing, machine processable.• Web Services. Standards. Protocols.• Collect collective intelligence• Infer intelligence

The Socio-Semantic Web. • Network effects by default. Collective

Intelligence. Computed Intelligence.• Users Add Value. Tagging. Blogging. • Machines Add Value. Content sharing.

Content and connection inference.• Unique content by people and automated

processes.• “Perpetual Beta” of semantics.

URI><a href=HTML

Web page Any Web Resource

<a href=“http://…”>

URI

URIURI

Resource Description Framework

The Semantics are in the Link

URI

URIConcept Web Resource

RDFSOWL

Adapted from Figure by Jim Hendler

p -> a; p=a

p -> a; p=a

p -> a; p=a

p -> a; p=a

p -> a; p=a

Web of Trust

Data Fusion

Model FusionR

DF

OW

L, RD

FSSW

RL

XML

SKO

S

Navigate the Semantic Web

Navigate the Web

Topic

Location

Date

University

Company

Funder

Annotation assert facts using terms (metadata in RDF)Represent terms and their relationships (ontology in RDFS/OWL)

ConferenceEvent Organisation

Professional Body

66

Annotation Links + Ontology• Annotation allows explicit decoration of documents

with concepts.

Link Service

Document LinkedDocument

Ontology LinkbaseAnnotations

68

SeaLife Project

69

70

71

Semantic Media Wikis

Link types – Yay! KB within Wiki

Courtesy Max Völkel

73

W3C Semantic Web and HealthCare And Life Sciences SIG

Courtesy Susie Stephens, Lilly

Smashing: A Semantic-Mash-Up

Courtesy Alan Ruttenberg, Science Commons

mc schraefel

The Next Big Thing: Adaptive Web-Based SystemsPaul De Bra, Lora Aroyo and Vadim Chepegin Journal of Digital Information, Volume 5 Issue 1

Article No. 247, 2004-05-27

Web 2.0Microformats AJAX, JSONTagging

CSS, XSLTXPointer, XML

Web 2.0REST, TaggingRSS, ATOM, APIsOpenID, Identity 2.0Ruby on Rails

Semantic Web

81

Web as Platform.• Integration in the model and the browser.• Lightweight development models.• Model, yes. Infrastructure, no.

(http://openanzo.org/).• Content. A little semantics goes a long way (SKOS)

The Socio-Semantic Web. • Consensual semantic acquisition• Social networking, Folksonomies, Tags• Plus ontologies• User Participation models.• More thinking, less reasoning.

Web 3.0?

82

Hypertext?

Web?

Hypertext?

84

“We should make merry and be glad”• Hypermedia as collective intelligence

– Not in the way the visionaries thought.– Really Open. We let in the oiks.

• Open Hypermedia as the mechanism– Composites & Links are thriving. Its done. Get over it.– Why bother with a formal link model? – Versioning and anchor models are still missing….

• Hypermedia authoring by Semantic Model authoring– Was link management, Now RDF management– Was dangling links, Now stale annotation and XPointer

frailty. Was link authoring, now ontology authoring

85

Engineering complexity• The Web worked because it was simple.• Extra layers of software engineering.• Xlink bombed. Need more than a standard.• Web succeeded without a link model.• Keep the footprint small. It will break. Get over it.• Vanilla technologies.

Authoring Complexity. • Extra layers of model. • Content! The Ontology! The Annotation!• Temptation to be too clever.• Hypermedia authoring becomes Annotation authoring –

get your link base!• Hypermedia authoring becomes Ontology authoring.

Stumbles

But ontology authoring and annotation authoring isn’t

hypermedia authoring

Seduced by knowledge …

• The ontology model is seductive way of driving the navigation between resources

• But a Model of knowledge is NOT a Model of Navigation

• You know about Hypermedia, Hypermedia design, Hypermedia patterns, Hypermedia navigation

Hypermedia - This is Our Time Figure Courtesy Tim Berners-Lee

89

Big take homes• Web 2.0 is deeply intertwingled with the hypertext

vision

• Semantic Web isn’t the universal panacea. It has many of the same problems as oh.

• It’s a myth that the Web doesn’t do links.

• Still more to do. You can help.

• Embrace!

90

Hypertext

Web? Web?

91

With thanks to…• Sean Bechhofer, David De Roure• Rest of the COHSE team: Yeliz Yesilada, Bernard

Horan, Les Carr, Wendy Hall• Simon Harper

• http://cohse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/• http://www.biotec.tu-dresden.de/sealife/

92

93

Questions…just what is Open?

• Are first class links worth the bother?– “I don’t want anyone with a GeoCities account

pointing back to me”• Is resource reuse only useful for closed teaching

systems? Or closed enterprises?• Open Hypermedia on the web – open to resources,

closed to the application?• Is the semantic web just link mashing?

94

Prodigal Son Returns• How to help and what to learn from.

• What we did wrong and hence what will go wrong.

• Used mainly in teaching.

• Where do you get the links from?

95

This is why our time has come.

• Back to the future• Your future is my past

• No.

• We are not waiting for the to catch up, the web is waiting for us.

• Could do if it wanted.

• The prodigal son picture, relabelled.