Almost a month since I last wrote?? What have I been doing? Well, I’ll tell you - amidst all the travelling and working and travelling for work, I bought a new apartment earlier this summer, and I’ve spent a lot of time over the past month getting it ready to move in, packing my stuff, and moving.

Usually when you tell people this, one of the first questions they will ask (at least in New York City) is how you found the place that you bought. Now, of course I had a real estate agent, but I had another indispensable tool: a website called StreetEasy.

I can’t remember who recommended this site to me, but I have now mentioned to anyone who even remotely shows an interest in buying a place in NYC. Basically, the site pulls in listings from all the major real estate companies, and you can search them.

It has some pretty detailed search parameters, and by signing up for a free account you can save your favorite searches and even have it alert you when new properties show up that meet your criteria. You can ask it to find places that meet your criteria and are having an open house on a certain day, save these to a list, and then print out a map showing all of them. When you’re looking at a property, it contextually displays other properties that are similar (in price, location, etc).

And when you find a place of interest, you can get details about the building, including what other apartments in the building have been sold in the past few years. For a small fee (I think $10 a month) you can sign up for the Insider account and find out how much those other apartments sold for. There are other benefits, but that was definitely my motivation for signing up for the premium service.

This feature probably saved me nearly $20K on my bid, because I could see the recent sale price of other apartments in the exact same configuration as mine. And when I no longer needed the premium service, they couldn’t have made it easier to cancel it.

Did I mention the discussions? Neighborhood stats? Posts about the impact of construction on the view from your prospective building? No, there’s too much to include here. I think this site is an incredible research tool with great data and an engaging, intuitive interface. I can’t see how someone could buy a home in New York City without it.

Today we had a full-day workshop with a client, and I periodically felt the need to twitter about it. There’s nothing in here specific to the client, and it’s probably interesting to no one, but I’m going to post it anyway.

• Bostoners are going to be parading today. Should be passing by the office where we’re meeting sometime in the next hour. about 7 hours ago from web
• Starting a 7 hour client meeting, and yes, I’ve had coffee. about 7 hours ago from web
• Have to remember that outside NY and some places out west, bagels are probably not worth having. about 7 hours ago from web
• Clarification: NY bagels and “out west” bagels are totally different species, but both yummy. about 7 hours ago from web
• Why take a perfectly good blondie and ruin it with raisins? about 4 hours ago from web
• damn it, lunch and caffeine withdrawal are making me crash about 3 hours ago from web
• the morning’s discussion was pretty congenial, but this afternoon, with discussion of personas, the room has suddenly become a bit hostile about 3 hours ago from web
• turns out that the problem isn’t so much with the personas themselves, but with the fact that we’re calling them “personas” about 2 hours ago from web
• one of the skeptics has become a supporter. Awesome about 2 hours ago from web
• turns out that they like the sausage, but they actually DIDN’T want to see the tour of the factory about 25 minutes ago from web

The last day of the Semantic Technology Conference has a few morning panels, a closing keynote, and then some afternoon seminars. But the day is really about saying goodbye to everyone, finally introducing yourself to a few of the people you’ve been crossing paths with for the past week, and making that annual trip to Koo-ki Sushi. Well, that’s what it’s about for me, anyway.

In the morning I went to a presentation on Semantic MediaWiki. Several guys from Monitor Group spoke about what they’ve learned in the year since they implemented semantic plug-ins on their internal wiki. I was particularly interested in this because at Avenue A | Razorfish we have an enterprise wiki of our own, and I’ve been trying to push to make it more semantically-enabled. The Monitor folks want to start a Semantic MediaWiki User group and and I told them to sign me up.

Then there was the closing keynote, which was about the business model of semantics and what you should tell your colleagues about the conference when you get back to the office. I really loved this panel, because there was a wide range of perspectives and backgrounds represented and they did a great job of, collectively, taking the measure of the event. Everyone has the sense that this is a discussion that’s on the brink of cracking open some major mysteries about the way we use the web, and it’s very exciting to be a part of it. And at the same time, we’re left with the feeling that next year is going to be even more interesting.

I’ll paraphrase some of the insights shared during the closing keynote:

• This stuff isn’t all at the beginning of the hype curve, some of it has made a couple cycles already. (That comment was for the folks who are new to the scene) (Jim Hendler)
• If you’re describing the value of something as being about semantic technology, you probably haven’t found the real business value yet. (Jeff Pollock)
• The key message is simplify - both in how we talk about it and how we do the work. (Jonathan Mack)
• “What vs. How” - figure out what we are trying to solve, then figure out how semantic technology can help. (Christine Connors)
• There’s a large variety of application areas, so there’s no one business model. There are different communities with different needs. (Ivan Herman)
• Semantics has no business model, but it has the potential to disrupt other business models before it creates new ones. LinkedIn would be dead in the water if everyone had a FOAF profile. (Steve Hall)
• People forget what the “I” in IT stands for. We’ve been doing a lot of technology without paying a lot of attention to the information side. (John Gilman)
• Never say “Ontology”. (John Gilman)

And what to tell your colleagues?

• There’s an embarrassment of riches here. (John Gilman)
• This isn’t the breakout year for this stuff, but it’s coming soon. (Steve Hall)
• Take the right sized step for your project. Just solve one discrete problem at a time, and don’t try to go back and fix everything. (Christine Connors)
• There’s a lot of real valuable services that already work. We need to get started before our competitors. The implications for the collaboration model are big. (Jonathan Mack)
• In a downturn year, this conference is still growing. (Jeff Pollock)
• People have big ideas here. (Jim Hendler)
• There’s no reason now not to do this. (Dave McComb)
  

Then I headed over to Koo-ki Sushi, which is sort of an annual pilgrimage for me when I come to the Semantic Technology Conference. My first year here I presented with Barbara McGlamery and for our talk we made up a fake website called “Confection Connoisseur” (which I used in this year’s presentation a bit too, so it’s actually become a running theme now). In the course of finding photos for our site mockups, we discovered this place Koo-ki Sushi which makes beautiful chocolates in the form of sushi. They’re handmade, and only sold in a little office park store front in San Jose (or you can buy them online). Of course we had to go there, and I make it a point to go back there every year.

I returned in time to go to the second half of a seminar on Entity Extraction tools. This is the part where they were actually describing the tools they evaluated, which is the part I was most interested in. Mostly I’m going to bring this information back to the tech folks and see if they want to investigate further.

Coming Soon: My wrapup of the conference, including other highlights and tidbits not previously mentioned.

• Day One: Tutorials (sioc & Freebase), Garlik & Twitter
• Day Two: Twine, Zepheira, Blue Organizer, Mainstream Markets & exhibits
• Day Three: My presentation, Future Directions, Calais, Rising Stars & my panel

Started out the day with my own presentation - Survey of Taxonomy Tools (follow the link to view the slides). It seemed to be pretty well received, for the most part. I included some time for discussion, and several people contributed interesting comments and questions. I was pretty happy with the turnout considering that this session was first thing in the morning.

After that I was so relieved, I’m surprised I could do anything, but I jumped right back into some interesting presentations, including a panel on Developing Semantic Web Applications, a talk on Calais, and a keynote that included several of the Rising Stars of the Semantic Web. Then I ended the day on the speaking side of the table again.

The panel on Developing Sem Web Apps was subtitled “Current Tools, Best Practices, & Future Directions.” I have to admit, this one was immediately following mine, so I was still having some trouble focusing, even though it included several fascinating people who I really admire. Hopefully there will be an audio file of this one and I can listen to it later sometime.

The presentation on Calais was a short solution session. Thomas Tague described several ways people can use their free semantic tagging service. I’m going to have to try it out, and I’m sure I’ll write about it further here. This is the second time I’ve heard someone mention the Powerhouse Museum collection - semantically tagged and searchable online.

The Rising Stars keynote was a little odd. There are so many incredibly interesting people here, it’s a bit weird to call some of them rising stars. Maybe they mean the companies, or the products. But it still seemed somehow out-of-character for this conference. In any case, what I learned is that I need to take a closer look at Powerset and that “The Killer App for Semantic Technology is Your Life (online)”. Tom Gruber (of Stealth-company.com) was responsible for that last insight. Killer Apps are always a big buzzword at this conference, with some people wondering what and when it will be, and other people arguing that there won’t be one, but that semantics will be used to make all the things you already do that much better. I’m in the latter camp, so Gruber’s comments resonated with me. A sort of 21st century “medium is the message” - it’s not going to be a particular service or site, it’s going to be a fundamental shift in the way we interact with the web.

During the last session of day I participated in a panel called How to Internally Market Semantic Web Technologies in Large Enterprises. I don’t have nearly as much experience as the other members of the panel, but I had a very different perspective because most of the others are engineers, and although we have all had similar struggles with stakeholders, I’ve worked more closely with designers and usability experts and so the resistance I tend to meet has more to do with UI and less to do with technology. I hope that this different perspective brought some additional insights to the panel discussion. If nothing else, at one point I made most of the people in the room crack up. So, on that count at least, I consider it to have been a success.

• Day One: Tutorials (sioc & Freebase), Garlik & Twitter
• Day Two: Twine, Zepheira, Blue Organizer, Mainstream Markets & exhibits
• Day Four: MediaWiki, Closing Keynote Panel, Koo-ki Sushi & Entity Extraction seminar

Started the day out with keynote speeches by Nova Spivack (Radar Networks) & Eric Miller (Zepheira). This was followed by presentations, of which my favorites were on Persistent Identifiers, Blue Organizer, and Bringing Semantics to Mainstream Markets. I closed the day out by going to the vendor exhibits.

Nova talked about what’s going on with Twine. In particular, he talked about some new features that will be rolling out this summer, while the site is still in invite-only beta, and what will be rolling out in the fall when the site becomes open to the public. The main features of interest to me are that the UI will become simpler, and their will be “a lot more semantics.” Admittedly, that’s a bit vague. (A new acquaintance, John Breslin, wrote about it in more detail on his blog).

Then Eric demonstrated various new open source tools, including Remix, which I found really interesting. I knew I would be interested in Remix. Months ago, when I talked to Eric about the premise of my presentation, he told me that I would be interested in Remix. The funny thing is that he always seems apologetic that the UI isn’t more sophisticated, but having recently looked at a lot of the data manipulation tools people are currently using, I can say with confidence that Remix is decades ahead of some of the things that people are muddling through. (Again, John Breslin has written a more detailed post on Eric Miller’s presentation.)

Next I went to see Eric Miller and his colleague David Wood speak about persistent identifiers. They discussed the use of URLs to “point” to real world things or concepts. See purlz.org for more info on this idea.

Alex Iskold gave a presentation of Blue Organizer, from Adaptive Blue. This is a semantically-enabled plug-in for Firefox. I had installed it a while ago, but found out from this presentation that there are a lot features that I haven’t been using. Also talked with Alex afterwards about an odd behavior and he said I should upgrade to the latest version. So, I think I need to reinstall and have a closer look at it. In general, what this tool does is provide specific, contextual actions that you can perform on a page, a link or any bit of text that you might highlight in a web page.

Later, as the exhibits were opening, Jeff Pollock (Oracle) gave a presentation on Bringing Semantics to Mainstream Markets. I thought Jeff was great ever since we met him a few years ago when he was working for Cerebra. First of all Jeff pointed out that Semantic Technology is not itself a market. But there’s a lot of talk this conference about semantics being a “blue ocean opportunity” (in other words: uncontested - get in now before the waters get bloodied!). He talked about how to make a good business case for adopting semantic technologies. This is one that I’m going to have to try to get a copy of so I can show it to the colleagues.

Then the exhibits, and my brain was so full by then that I don’t really remember what I saw. I walked around collecting information, met a couple new people, and talked with some old friends. I’ll sort through the business cards and brochures later and put all the pieces together.

• Day One: Tutorials (sioc & Freebase), Garlik & Twitter
• Day Three: My presentation, Future Directions, Calais, Rising Stars & my panel
• Day Four: MediaWiki, Closing Keynote Panel, Koo-ki Sushi & Entity Extraction seminar

It occurred to me, towards the end of day one of this conference, that I’ve been making my panel choices based on the speaker more than the on the topic. Now that I know more about who is doing what, this seems to be a better indicator of whether I’ll find the presentation interesting. Of course, I still take the topic into consideration, but my knowledge of the speaker will carry equal weight and will certainly come into play as a tie breaker.

So, today I went to one tutorial by some guys from DERI and one by some guys from Metaweb (makers of Freebase), and then a presentation by Tom Ilube, of Garlik. All three were just as excellant as I’d hoped.

First up, I went to a tutorial called “The Future of Social Networks: The Need for Semantics,” led by Stefan Decker, John G. Breslin and Uldis Bojars of DERI (Digital Enterprise Research Institute). They talked about the proliferation of Social Networking Services and how they developed an ontology called SIOC (pronounced “shock”) to wrap around networks, users, and content so that data about these people and items a) would be published in a semantic form and b) could be interoperable. I’ve been trying to think of a good metaphor for this. Still working on it.

Afterwards, while Eric Hoffer and I were talking to John about the cool logo he designed for SIOC, Uldis wrapped up his conversation and turned to me and asked “Did you go to Hack Day London?” I figured he had seen the “Hack London” sticker on the back of my laptop while he was speaking. I wonder if social networks will ever be as good at facilitating secondary social connections as a sticker on a laptop. No reason why they couldn’t, right?

In the afternoon I went to a tutorial called “Creating Semantic Mashups: Bridging Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web” presented by Jamie Taylor, Colin Evans and Toby Segaran of Metaweb. I love that they’re here doing this because Freebase is not really using semantic web standards, but I always felt that in spirit it is a semantic application. Now I see why that’s the case.

For one thing, their attitude towards Semantic Technology is, essentially, just use what you need. They don’t use semantic technology for the sake of using it, they mix in the unique elements that support what they want to do. They operate on the principal of collaborative semantics: ontology as a social contract. And finally, they believe that data wants to be free. So, of course, I loved it.

Finally, I went to Tom Ilube’s presentation called “The Semantic Web, Social Graphs and Social Verification“. He’s a very engaging speaker, and the topic is one that really needs to be addressed - how to people create, maintain and protect their online identity.

Towards the end, we had a spontaneous Twitter convergence when Uldis, who was sitting behind me, received a tweet from Pete Thomas, who commented on a recent blog post I wrote about this conference. Neither of us had met him before. Awesome coincidence!

• Day Two: Twine, Zepheira, Blue Organizer, Mainstream Markets & exhibits
• Day Three: My presentation, Future Directions, Calais, Rising Stars & my panel
• Day Four: MediaWiki, Closing Keynote Panel, Koo-ki Sushi & Entity Extraction seminar

Heading out to San Jose tomorrow for STC 2008. In addition to my presentation, Surveying Taxonomy Building Tools (Wednesday, May 21, 8:30-9:30AM), I’ll also be participating in a late addition panel called How to Internally Market Semantic Web Technologies in Large Enterprises (Wednesday, May 21, 5:30-6:30PM). Hope to see you there!

I ran across the phrase “devastating success” in an old article called The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know. It’s about the impact of Wal-Mart’s pricing policies on the companies that supply them with merchandise. The complete sentence was “For Vlasic, the gallon jar of pickles became what might be called a devastating success.”

I love the way this simple phrase expresses a fairly complex concept - to achieve what you set out to accomplish, but in so doing, ending up worse off than you were before. I’ve seen this happen, and I’ve generally described the phenomenon as “they failed by succeeding”. But I think devastating success is so much more elegant.

(Thanks, Jason, for pointing me to the article.)

Last night at about 2am I finally bowed to the pressure to sign up for Twitter. I’m still not sure how I feel about it. I have a tendency towards, shall we say, over-analyzing. I like to deliberate, which is generally not as highly valued an approach as on-demand spontaneous displays of genius, but I’m not sure that uninhibited exposure of my every thought is the solution to that problem. (And yes, I realize that “on-demand” and “spontaneous” are, by nature, in conflict.)

There are a few other reasons that I’ve been resisting Twitter.

1. What’s going to happen to quiet contemplation? I live in New York CIty, a place where there is nearly constant sensory input. Having a peaceful moment to oneself is a rare enough occurrence. If we have no internal thoughts that stay private, will we lose the skills to develop careful thought?
2. I don’t like what this kind of thing has done to my inner monologue. I hate to admit it, but I already find myself narrating my activities in a format compliant with Facebook status updates. It annoys me, but I can’t help it.
3. I already suffer from information overload in many aspects of my life. This is not going to help.
4. I adore my friends, and I feel disappointed when I don’t have time to communicate with them as much as I’d like. But I don’t want Twitter to take the place of personal communication, and I definitely don’t want to be held responsible for failing to diligently follow their exposed inner monologues.
5. At the same time, I wonder if it’s wise to subject my twitter subscribers to my every thought. Look at me, I’m sharing! So what? There’s probably a reason why most of these thoughts are internal. The ones that are valuable usually come up again, at which point I share them, discuss them, and write about them.

Well, we’ll see. At this point I have been on Twitter less than 24 hours. Maybe I’ll love it and be converted. Maybe I’ll find it an indispensable communication tool. And maybe it will even encourage me to engage in more spontaneous, unedited thinking. If I find that to be true, I’m sure you’ll be able to read about my experiences here.

(In the meantime, here’s a link to my twitter feed, if you’re curious to see how it’s progressing. No promises about the quality of the content!)

I’ve been thinking a lot about semantic search and what makes something relevant. I realized that, in addition to something “having significant and demonstrable bearing on the matter at hand” (M-W), there are at least two other factors that affect how useful an item of content is.

The first is: Quality. Something can be very pertinent to a topic, but if it’s unclear, incomplete, inaccurate, or just plain bad then it probably isn’t going to do you much good. A blurry image of someone doesn’t really let you know what they look like.

The second is Timeliness. This one is tricky - it has to do with the lifecycle of a content item. The most common offenders on the web are usually really old content (often with no date stamp, so you can only guess how old and out-of-date it is). But premature content can be just as worthless. How many times have you seen something of interest, months before you had reason to act on it, then when the appropriate time rolls around you’ve forgotten about it? Or maybe you read something at a time when you really didn’t understand the significance, then later you couldn’t remember where you saw it, or how to get back to it?

So, if semantics are a better way of expressing relevance, and perhaps social media sharing can help us navigate to high quality content, what’s going to help us determine the timeliness of content?