The Tetherless World Weblog

by Jie Bao

Some of our Tetherless World researchers including me have just written a short paper to sell the idea of constructing a “webtop” using semantic technologies. In short, a webtop is a desktop on the web, that does similar jobs such as managing files, doing word processing, managing contacts, scheduling tasks, emailing, etc. Please see some examples of webtops with pretty GUIs.

Almost one decade ago, there has been hot for a while for the concept of “network computer”. At that time, a network computer means some low-end computer with limited storage and computational capacity that relying on the network to get great power. The webtop idea reminds me of network computer as they, while are different in many aspects, share the same idea of powering users with networked infrastructure. Ten years ago, this vision was tested with physical computers but largely failed, while today, with the advance of technologies, is revived by allowing users to create virtual computers that only exist on the websphere. I have many reasons to believe this time it will not only survive, but also prevail.

One reason is from my personal experience. From about two years ago, I stopped installing many software that have been with me for many years: Encarta is replaced by Wikipedia.com, Outlook is replaced by Gmail, MS Street is replaced by Google Maps, MS Word is replaced by writing in wiki, Powerpoint is replaced by online latex writing with the Beamer package, among a long list of other things. Browser is the application I stayed for more than 80% of time when I’m on my computers. There is indeed a strong need for me to organize all such online applications and data — simply bookmarking is barely a solution. I need something that can organize them, enable me quick access to them, and last but not least, pretty and neat. A webtop does exactly those things.

How semantic technologies help in providing a webtop? Actually, long before the term “ontology” getting popular, users are already creating ontologies on daily bases: email classification, creating file folder trees, grouping contacts or naming a photo as “Wedding picture at Troy”, all those efforts are creating relations between things or annotating a “meaning” to an entity. With semantic technologies, those relations and annotations can be made explicit so that data can be more easily managed and queried. For example, I may query that “find all 2005 photos of my friends”, or “show all meetings (even if they are not called meeting, such as “briefing”) in the past month”. A webtop based on semantic technologies will make such an ability universal to any application on its top.

There have been controversies about semantic web ever since the term is coined. I think this is partly because the semantic web community as a whole, failed to provide enough end-user friendly tools that can do something helpful in daily life. I wish to see more tools to help daily web activities: semantic email, semantic blog, semantic calender, semantic abstract of news (a little more than RSS), tagging files (picture, mp3,…) with taxonomy, etc. Even more important, to survive, such an application should never ask users to learn RDF or anything needs more than 3 minutes to understand. Bring such applications together, it’s a webtop. I believe something like this is one of the killer apps the community has long been waiting for.

I just noticed the “OWL 2 Web Ontology Language: Requirements” document from the OWL Working Group. Interestingly, while the “W” in OWL stands for “Web”, I didn’t see any use case from web applications in the usual sense. As the leading requirements are from the need for domain knowledge bases, I would suggest the name of the new language, instead of OWL 2, to be Ontology Language of Domains (OLD) — Just kidding. OWL claims to be needed by common web users, but such users are surprisingly under-represented in the specification process. We have already seen many specially designed, highly expressive, but, narrowly applied languages in the old KR schools. Do we need to invent yet another one here, again?

Jie

Debbie Heisler has just sent me a link “Internet overhaul wins approval“. One of the proposals mentioned catching my eye is that domain names written in Asian, Arabic or other scripts will be supported.

Although it may not be a new idea (for example, 3721.com, now part of Yahoo!, has provided a service of supporting urls in Chinese for years), having local names other than Roman characters is absolutely a good move. About 10 years ago, I was asked to teach one of my father’s colleague on how to use computers; it was a hard job because she didn’t know how to use keyboard, which in turn because she didn’t know what are characters “A”, “B”, “C”. My mom is better: she is now a daily web surfer and she knows Roman characters – but she can never remember English words like “Google”, not to mention google.com. What she does now is to set a hub page as her browser’s homepage, with a Google link on it (and of course, in Chinese). She uses baidu.com, a Chinese counterpart of Google, more frequently than Google, partly because the word “Bai Du”, which literally means “a hundred times”, is much easier for her to remember (on the other hand, Google’s local name “Guge” is almost meaningless).

We people in academia are so used to our (both language and technical) education and sometimes take many things for granted. Two weeks earlier at the Tetherless World Grand Opening, Wendy Hall, the ACM President-elect, had mentioned that in her recent visit to China for the WWW 2008 conference, she was surprised to learn that there is such a huge part of web that is only in Chinese. “Chinese may be the most popular language on the web in the future”, she said. This may or may not become true, but I agree that web technologies should be easier to use and consider internationalization even more.

However, “ease” means differently for different people. When my mom learned to use mouse, she had to use her both hands to control it :) — and she did not give up only because she wanted to use computers to communicate with me. Last weekend, I tried to teach my father-in-law to use computers, he also had a hard time to control the mouse: regular computer users have an _instinct_ to locally relocate the mouse so we never feel “the line is too short”, but he has no such an instinct.

I’m a little off the topic. But what I want to say is that computers should be designed not only for the youth, but also for seniors; not only for English-speaking people, but also for the other 3/4 of people in the world; not only for geeks, but also for grandmas.

As to the Semantic Web, we should also always keep our “users” in mind. Who gonna use semantic web? What things are on the top list we should support? I have been long thinking about this question: as most of our daily web activities are emailing, blogging, calendaring, searching, etc., why there is still no end user oriented semantic tools to help us for such activities? For example, I have tried many “semantic search engines”, e.g., Swoogle, SWSE and Sindice, none of them can be considered end-user oriented: I cannot explain most of their results in RDF to my mom, just for an example. Google is a killer app, as my mom can use it even if she cannot spell “Google” itself. We will need something like that.

Jie Bao

Below is an email I sent to the group today.

———————-

Dear TW friends

You must have already known the huge earthquake occurred on May 12 in
Sichuan, China. It has caused enormous loss of lives: more than 50,000
confirmed death, around 30,000 missing, plus about 300,000 people
injured as of today. The whole nation, as well as Chinese all over the
world including me, are in deep sorrow for the tragedy.

For the memorial of the earthquake victims, on May 19 14:28pm (Beijing
Time), sharply one week after the earthquake, Chinese public held a
moment of silence. People stood silent for three minutes while air
defense, police and fire sirens, and the horns of vehicles, vessels
and trains sounded.

Google China released a traffic curve for the three minutes [1]. At
the deepest point, it dropped to 10% of the normal traffic. At the
time, millions of people stopped their work on computers, stood up and
lowered their heads to observe. The curve clearly conveys a message of
national unity of the Chinese people in a time of calamity. I’m pride
to be a part of the people.

Web plays an important role in the earthquake relief this time.
Messages and information are exchanged on the web much faster than
traditional ways in helping the rescue work. For example, when a girl
heard that army helicopters couldn’t find a landing site around her
home town, she immediately posted a good location on the internet, and
it was replicated thousands time across many sites in just a few
hours, until it reaches the army command. For another example, when
all communication avenues were cut off from the outside world, the
first message from the isolated area was from the website [2] of the
local government, which was revived by backup power and link; due to
reports from the website, it was decided to use airdrop instead of
land rescue for some area, otherwise it will be too late.

This can still be improved. With semantic web, such information can be
propagated, instead of by human forwarding, by software agents in just
seconds, to the handheld device of the pilot of helicopter. In
earthquake relief, every second saved in knowledge aggregation and
propagation means more hope for lives. I hope this dream of tetherless
world can become true as early as possible.

Thank you for reading this.

Jie

[1] http://googlechinablog.com/2008/05/blog-post_22.html
[2] http://www.abazhou.gov.cn