The Tetherless World Weblog

As a long-time Web technologist, one of the many creators of the Semantic Web technology recently being put into use by Google, and a government expert on the Internet and Web, I find myself worried about the reported deal emerging between Google and Verizon. If, as reported, this would truly allow the differential handling of packets based on pay, then it would clearly be a threat to the net as we know it, and a potential disaster for the small smart-ups and freelance Web developers that are so important to our technology’s eco-system.

It is certainly within Google’s right to make money, and to use the Web technologies that were freely donated to the world by people like myself or, significantly more importantly Tim Berners-Lee (a strong proponent of net neutrality). However, allowing preferential packet routing provides a means for the control and exploitation of these technologies that goes beyond the original intent.

The social affects are also quite worrying. I don’t see how a deal like this can avoid  increasing the width of the digital divide between those who can afford enhanced service and those who can.  It also seems like it will have different impacts in some societies than others, making Web behaviors even less predictable, and more susceptible to government control, than they are today.

Within the US, practice has maintained net neutrality where legislators have been remiss and where the courts have rightly been unwilling to impose policy in in the absence of legislation.  The Google-Verizon deal has been reported by some Google fans as Google reaching a compromise with Verizon that might otherwise allow the latter to impose its own models, and by some others as Google clearly violating their own “do no evil” motto.  Either way, it is a worrisome deal that is likely to set the precedent for many others, and to scare legislators from doing what they should: As a candidate, President Obama’s commitment was  to net neutrality, stating that he would be second to no one as a proponent of a free and open Internet.  The Democratic Congress has not rallied to the President’s side on this, nor have the Republicans rallied to their stated goal of providing a fair playing field for startup industry. The action taken by large companies to set their own rules is likely to cause these gun shy legislators to take an opposing action in a year where so many are fighting for re-election.

So I find myself joining those who are calling on Google minimally for more transparency into what is happening and preferably to continue their own opposition to preferential charging.  In 2006 Google urged Americans to “take action to preserve Internet freedom.”  Today their policy blog is surprisingly silent on the reported negotiations.   My motivation to call on Google for at least a response comes from their own call – it is an action I take to preserve Internet freedom.

As a corporation dependent on the Internet for communication, on the start-ups for continued innovation, and on academic researchers to keep a flow of new Web technologies transitioning into practice, I hope Google will heed their own call to action and will do the right thing.

I  recently was asked to talk about Web Science to the US President’s Innovative Technology Advisory Committee. My comments focused on the role of the Web as a critical infrastructure, and on the need for us to better understand it.  More on what I said and my written remarks can be found on my Nature.com blog at:

http://blogs.nature.com/jhendler/2010/06/30/the-web-is-a-critical-infrastructure—we-must-understand-it

I have written a blog about the Linked Open Government Project:

(intro)
This entry is a backgrounder, rather than a technical piece – the goal is to introduce some new work that my RPI laboratory has been doing aimed at using Semantic Web technologies to help the US government in their data sharing efforts at the Data.gov site. Since similar work is going on on the British Data.gov.uk website, led by my colleagues Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt, (with some “friendly rivalry” between the two), I thought it might be worth providing some background, and pointers to this work.

(update – DOH!  Here is the link:

http://blogs.nature.com/jhendler/2010/06/01/linked-open-government-data-and-the-semantic-web

)

Dean and I were very pleased to learn that “Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist” is being published in Japanese.  We were asked to write a preface for the Japanese version — since it will only appear in print in Japanese, I thought I’d share it here in English (pretranslation):

We are very pleased to be able to write this new Preface introducing the Japanese translation of our book. Japanese researchers have been involved in Semantic Web technologies since the very early days, and we are honored that our book has been chosen for translation and republication to make it more accessible to the Japanese audience.

In the less than two years since this book was published, we have seen a large growth of interest in the Semantic Web and the new Web applications it makes available. This includes the commercial interest in new enterprise solutions, in new ways to bring data to the Web, and in the large-scale “Web 3.0” applications that can be enabled by combining Semantic Web data with other Web applications. New terms such as “semantic search,” “intelligent match,” and “virtual personal assistant” are starting to make it out of the laboratories and into the world of Web startups. Turning the mass of data available through the Web into useful knowledge increasingly demands new techniques and new technologies to succeed, and the Semantic Web is becoming more recognized as an important player in the growing Web world.

One of the reasons for the increasing interest in these technologies is the lack of success of that “folksonomies” and Web 2.0 approaches have had in stemming the growing tide of Web information. In fact, just the opposite – new media such as blogs, social networks and twitter™ have led to people spending more and more time on the Web, but with less and less ability to find specific things they need. Without semantics, the Web is turning into a wonderful wonderland for entertainment, but less and less a productive space for solving the real problems being faced by people, companies and governments in today’s increasingly complex world.

As this interest has grown, it has also been becoming clear that critical to the successful application of these technologies is an ability to model at some level. To get a first demo up and running is not hard, but just as a real application of a data base must include a data model, so must a real application using semantic technologies include a model of the information of interest – an ontology. In this book, we provide you with the background necessary to begin to understand, and build, Semantic Web ontologies. As our title implies, our goal is to help the “working ontologist” – with our focus on the practice, rather than the theory, of Semantic Web development. We focus on the “how,” rather than the “why,” so as to enable you to better understand how to use these important new technologies.

We appreciate your welcoming us into the Japanese marketplace. We particularly thank the translators who are helping us bring the book into your language and the developers of the use cases added to this Japanese edition of the book so as to better show how these technologies are already having an impact in Japan. We thus hope this translation of our book will further your ability to develop innovative applications both within Japan and in the increasingly global economy.

Dean Allemang and Jim Hendler, 1/1/2010

The joy of multiple blog sites is having to post pointers to one blog entry from another.

My blog at nature.com now has an entry entitled “The Semantic Web: My personal (unofficial) FAQ” which lives at http://network.nature.com/people/jhendler/blog/2009/08/03/the-semantic-web-my-personal-unofficial-faq. Comments, and especially your suggestions for Qs and As are more than welcome there or here (or anywhere else for that matter)

Cheers,

Jim H.