...a blog on the intersection of human computer interaction and the semantic web.
Semantic Web Browser: user is the winner!
I bet you found yourself in a situation like this. You need a phone number to call into a company quickly. You try Google luck, but no success. So you set out for a hunt in their website jungle. And seconds are ticking. Why is the contact information always on a different place? Ok, you found it. Made the call. Ready to go. Oh wait where is it? You got the address. Ouch! Webmaster was too lazy to provide you with a link to a map. So you copy the address to clipboard, open a new tab with Yahoo! maps, wait until it loads, paste it into search field, search, disambiguate and go. What a pain! And next time again - as the information will be somewhere else.
Well, actually not! It's not a web of documents any more, it's a web of data. With infrastructure like microformats or RDFa and plugins like Operator, WebCards or Wikidentity, we can do common things with a consistent user interface across the whole web very easily. Find the location of a company (or actually location of anything you're just looking at) on a map, add event to a calendar with a single click, and more to come!
And it would be a pitty to think inside the box (browser). We are standing on the beginning of a revolution of how we browse the web. The data is freed from presentation and race for great innovations in the web user interaction begins. From viewing and integration plugins to user mashups. And in the end: the user is the winner!
If you want to experience it yourself, here is a 2 minutes scenario:
Posted at 11:32PM Mar 14, 2007 by Jiri Kopsa in RFE | Comments[1]
If you are a blogger, you probably know it. If you are a reader, you may expect it. Blogging is like riding a bike. One needs to learn it first. Our lesson from the past two months is: don't try to perfect your posts, or you'll end up with a pile of unpublished stuff. If you think your thoughts or pointers may be valuable to some, just post them. We're going to fix that in the upcoming months.
- Jiri Kopsa and Josef Holy
Posted at 11:32PM Mar 14, 2007 by Jiri Kopsa in RFE | Comments[0]
Happy New Year (of semantic web) 2007!
The "5 things you don't know about me" internet meme have taken a nice spin recently. Google now returns 32.500 occurences of '"blog-tag" pulver', and about 136.000 occurences of '"blog-tag" "5 things"' (alright it's 174k after 2 days). Although big part of the blogosphere seems to attribute its beginning to Jeff Pulver (the father of VoIP), searches reveal that the meme itself had already appeared in various forms in the past.
It's a beautiful reflection of the humanity in the network. It's exciting and breath taking. It's a blink of what Jonathan Schwartz of Sun coined as Participation Age.
It also reveals how primitive is the way we access the things on the network. We can track particular person to person interactions, enthusiastic bloggers are tracking individual generations of this meme; however the path often ends due to a mistyped or mistargeted link and to get a big picture is almost impossible.
Fortunately something is being done. It's the web of data or web 3.0, if you will (or excuse). It's Talk Digger and SIOC that will allow us to observe the next wave from birds-eye perspective. It's the semantic web (hopefully with semantic desktop #2 #3) that will unleash the power of the network. It's all these things together finally emerging in 2007. So exciting!
Happy New Year!
-Jiri Kopsa
Posted at 09:11PM Dec 27, 2006 by Jiri Kopsa in RFE | Comments[1]
We have been thinking about starting a blog for a long time. However, things which did (and still do) excite and interest us, have usually excited us so much, that we have been spending most of our time reading about them, instead of writing about them (and thus we have been part of the so-called 'silent majority').
So we have been accumulating bookmarks, new knowledge and a few homemade-semantic-web-prototypes while waiting for some strong impulse, which would suck us into the blogging community. This impulse came just a few days ago - the 5 things meme madness. This simple Christmas fun, this time invoked by one specific blogger, has assured us that what is currently going on on the web is the emergence of the new web - the web of data, the semantic web, or the web 3.0 (hello marketing droids!). And although Google has just recently turned down their WS search API, we still do believe that semantic web, we have been waiting for for so long, is finally coming and that in 2007 we will start to witness it's wide adoption.
This blog is called 'RFE', which means 'Request For Enhancement' - quite well-known and widely used term in the (software) engineering field. We, its authors, are two interaction designers at Sun developer tools organization (do you do NetBeans?) and our job is to shout for enhancements all the time ;) We see the emerging semantic web as a way of how the information technology could serve us (the people) much better than it does now. Nice example of this in praxes could be the 5 things meme tracker. This thing is in our miserable Web 2.0 reality being maintained by a human, while it actually could be a really nice job for that gigahertz beast, you are currently using to read this blog (and most likely not for too much of anything else at the time). This is what machines should do and you bet they will very soon.
The main topics which we would like to cover in this blog are semantic web, web services and SOA, the semantic wiki, which we have been working on for a while, as well as other semantic hacks we have somewhere in our folders. We would like to put all these things into the context of the user-centered design, because that is the only right approach to make any new thing successful. Things become tools in the hand of a man, but they have to fit that hand right at first.
We hope you find it interesting.
- Josef Holy and Jiri Kopsa
Posted at 09:11PM Dec 27, 2006 by Jiri Kopsa in RFE | Comments[0]
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