This summer we are hosting a total of 9 students doing internships. The programme is supported by the ministries bmvit and bmukk and is called “generation innovation“.
The themes the students covered includes
Usability
Tag Clouds
Flash Overlays
geotaging on the iPhone
Open Street Map Clients
Rich-Client-Applications
We got some very good feedback by the students. Firstly, the got a completely different view of research and IT; they were exposed to a way of working with a high degree of self-responsibility (which was appreciated very much); and finally, they had fun.
Personally, I believe that the way of opening up research labs to young people means that they get to know what research in practise is; and the researchers themselves are confronted with new (and fresh) ideas and this is of benefit to both sides.
There is a German video available at Salzburg.com.
… an interesting tool that allows a visual comparison of the coverage of various maps, e.g. google maps vs. open streetmap (OSM). Based on people’s enthusiasm, in many (local) places the OSM coverage is much deeper/exacter. However, with respect to quality necessary for routing and navigation applications, OSM in its current status will not be sufficient.
Comparing google maps (left) and open streetmap (right)
it points at Techno-Z, home of Salzburg Research. One can see that buildings, local paths, etc. are covered much better in OSM than in google maps. Still, this is what we as human users interpret; software/machine readability can be – and is! – quite different.
One of the issues is to define the scope of “future”, i.e., are we talking 10 years, 20 years, etc.? IMHO I believe that for applied research already 5 years is a pretty long period.
Anyway, there is a nice publication (in German only) by the Feldafinger-Kreis: “Trends, Technologies and Applications”. They argue for the following trends
Peer-to-Peer Networking
Embedded Software-intensive Systems
Security and Safety / Privacy / Self-Defending
Semantic Technologies
Knowledge Management
Intelligent Software-Agents
Service Grids in the Internet of Services
Intelligent Resource Management
Self-Managed Systems
e-Processes
Internet of Things
Mobility / Networked Vehicles
Ambient Assisted Living
Human-Computer Interaction
As far as our own work is concerned, I think that the following items are of particular interest to our research
the Internet of things (we were talking about all-Ip building infrastructure)
ambient assistance
realtime geography/mobile systems
semantic technologies
Also, in March 2008 the European Commission hosted an event in Slovenia on the Future Internet, see the following URL http://www.fi-bled.eu/ and a short video:
The other one was in “research eu” (No. 56, June 2008) on the “Finnish model tops the ranking”.
The first article argues that Austria has substantially intensified its research activities and has come from an innovation follower to the position of an innovation leader. The research quote was increased form 1,7 % (in 1997) to 2,63 % in 2008. The increase has been achieved by more spending from the public as well as from industry (fostered by tax incentives and programmes).
The second article argues in a similar fashion about Finland (albeit with a longer historical perspective).
The interesting thing to me is, that in a short period – we are only talking about 10+ years in both cases – a country can be reshaped concerning its FTI-policy. I think this is amazing, I would not have thought that this is possible in such short timeframes (even one might argue that for a sustainable impact including a change of culture this will take at least 25 years …).
Today, we had a successful review of Semway, a project dealing with adding high-level semantics to navigation systems so that they are (more/better) suitable for pedestrians. Karl Rehrl is Semway’s project manager.
What I like about this project: it innovates something that we believe is already working (i.e., navigation systems) in a radically new way so that we can use navigation systems also as pedestrians, or as hikers, ski-tourers, etc. As humans we simply do not navigate according to geo-coordinates but much more with landmarks; we can walk through parks, along rivers, etc.
The main issue I see is in providing/generating semantically enhanced content (btw: the same is true for many semantic web applications as well) so that Semway’s features can be exploited. Besides technological approaches such as text-mining (from existing sources) and others, a community-based approach as is done in openstreetmap.org would be an option.
Atomic Austria is industrial partner in Semway; the project is mainly funded by FFG/BMVIT.
According to Nova, the Semantic Web is about connecting „everything“, i.e., concepts, things, words, etc. more than a social graph. Saying that “Joe” is of type “Person” and “Palo Alto” is of type “city”. This is not just a hyperlink.
Web 3.0 starts a new decade, the 3rd decade of the Web. It is about enriching the structure of the web, transforming the web form something that’s more like a fileserver to something that’s more like a database.
The 1st era was that of the PC: focused on the frontend. The Web 1.0 focused on the backend; Web 2.0 focuses on the frontend again (AJAX, etc.); Web 3.0 will be backend again. Like a pendulum that swings back. Web 3.0 is a fundamental upgrade to the infrastructure of the web.
Web 4.0 (the fourth decade) will be smarter interfaces and smarter tools, smarter user experience.
According to Nova, there are five approaches for bringing intelligence to the web:
Tagging: very easy to do (which is a pro and a con). Tags at the end of the day are meaningless, e.g. the same person will tag things differently in different situation. One needs a large data set for making sense out of tags.
Statistical approach: what e.g. google does, very stable, does not add semantics
Linguistic approach: trying to actually understanding the meaning of text; is very computationally intensive, hard to scale, etc.
Semantic Web approach: set of open standards by the W3C, i.e., using meta-data to describe the meaning of data; the use of meta data is open to all applications; needs tools, needs someone who creates the metadata, …
Artificial intelligence: software that really thinks, it will take at least some more decades, scalability is a big issue, etc. AI will be huge in Web 4.0. Cycorp is working on such an approach for the last 15 years or so.
The question is whether you make software smarter or data smarter (or both). The Semantic Web is a kind of compromise.
There are two types of approaches to achieve this:
Everyone is going to manually create semantic web content (bottom up).
Today, we generate RDF, OWL, etc. (semi-)automatically using tools (top down).
Sun says: The network is the computer. Nova says: The Web is the database!
Smart data is data that carries what is needed to make sense of it. The data is self-describing. This allows you to write “dumb software”, i.e., with a general piece of software that you put at medical data will allow you to give medical advice.
We are not trying to replace human intelligence. Machines are good at number crunching; this is what they should do. Humans are intelligent, we need to assist the humans with machines, i.e., computers in the semantic web.
Just-in-time-data is another concept. The semantic web provides the basis for it by using ontologies (like schemas in DBMSs) to achieve that.
The WebOS is coming. The WebOS needs a file system, the semantic web is a candidate for that. With the semantic web we add an open database layer on top of today’s web.
Standards are important: RDF, OWL (built on RDF), SPARQL (SQL for RDF), SWRL (a rule language), GRDDL -> see the W3C site for details.
“DataWeb” as better term for Semantic Web; with triple stores as new types of databases (based on e.g. relational DBMSs) to manage (the large) lists of triples. Scales better on the web.
Geo-names, music-names, sioc, etc. and many more ontologies and connected data do already exist.
Right now still in early adoption of this period. 007-2009 as first wave, a couple of million end-users in their day-to-day- live. twine, freebase, etc.
FOAF; SIOC; are good places to start.
Questions
Does the semantic web offer any new business models? The semantic web does not introduce any new business models (in addition to the existing ones such as search, advertise, media & content, …) but it makes things smarter. But the semantic web allows new players to come into the market.
Openness? if your business is about being evil, will you do better with the semantic web? It will be more difficult for you, because the semantic web will generate data that is self-descriptive; i.e. lock-in strategies will be harder to achieve.
I have heard in the year 2000 about the semantic web. Now it’s 2008 and it is still not there. Will it – and when – take off? We often forget that there was 15 years of research in hypertext, protocols, etc. before we could use the web in the early 90ies. We often forget about that. The same (and probably a longer period) will be necessary for the semantic web.
How do you address global definitions? Good question! The semantic web does not require a global definition. The semantic web was designed for disagreement. Therefore, the problem is that there may be many definitions. Hence, the standards were built to include a mechanism to create mappings to define equivalences, etc. The winners will be the ones that have the content that lead the definitions of the standards AND have the data.
… www.openstreetmap.org is a pretty cool initiative, aiming at developing free, editable maps. Fundamental concepts include
it is a community driven process
the IPRs stay with the person who edits the (part of) the map
you are not allowed to copy from existing material
coverage of main locations is really good, e.g. most of Germany, in Austria mainly Vienna (with Linz coming up fast)
openstreetmap provides an open concept, i.e., basically you are not editing streets (albeit the name is “streetmap”) but lines (with links), polygones and therefore shapes. You add “semantics” by providing tags
various editors exist, e.g. a flash-based built in editor (by the name of Potlatch) but also external ones such as josm or OSM mapper, and others.
potentially this could be threatening Navteq or Teleatlas …
Someone should implement an OSM navigating software!
In order to reach the “3% target” (as outlined in the Lisbon and Barcelona objectives), governmental and public institutions can further stimulate research by rethinking procurement processes. The volume of these processes in Austria is estimated at 40 Billion EUR, about 10% of that could be earmarked with innovation. I.e., the idea is that public agencies and the government foster innovation by asking tenderers to develop new/innovative solutions that require some amount of research and have a good leverage (for all of us). Examples mentioned (mainly with respect to environmental themes) include the British government that has recently advertised a call for low carbon vehicles in the U.K. (volume: 50 Mio. Pounds).
My estimation: this is an excellent idea. Mainly because it will support a shift in mindset, i.e., everyone will be thinking in terms of innovation and research. It needs however, IMHO, a substantial critical mass and adds extra complexity.
Promotion of people in fundamental research. The idea here is to develop a programm following the COMET-schema (K2-K1-K-Projekt) in terms of excellence targeted at supporting people’s careers. Details are still missing, typically one would have a look at the science funds existing funding schemes (which could simply be “boosted” rather than developing new programmes). Press article at http://derstandard.at/?url=/?id=3397370.
www.arnetminer.org is a great (not to say incredible) site/tool implementing a researchers’ social web, see e.g. arnetminer.org with Siegfried Reich. I am impressed by the quality of the findings, the number (and quality of links) of people I have published papers with. Well done guys!
BTW: I came across arnetminer while looking at www.yasni.de, a site that I was pointed to by my colleague Sandra Schaffert. It also includes my Amazon wish list which is less desirable …
And: both, artminer.org and yasni.de are technically highly professional Web 2.0 sites with an almost desktop application like appearance.
Today, we had a successful review of