See you in ISWC 2009

I will go to attend ISWC 2009 tomorrow. If you are there, please stop by and say hi. See you there.

ISWC 2009

I am going to attend ISWC 2009 (The 8th International Semantic Web Conference) this year at Washington, D.C. If you will come to the same event, I would like to meet you and have a chat. Please leave me a comment or drop me an email.

DEMO versus TechCrunch: credit, money, and passion

In 18 years, DEMO continuously proves itself to be a leader that helps entrepreneurs showcase their novel products as well as venture capitals meet up with new startups that are of great potential. At this fall, however, DEMO is going to face a real "head-to-head" competitor. After DEMOfall 2008 was announced from Sept. 7-9 at San Diego, TechCrunch50 declared to be hold from Sept. 8-10 at San Fransisco.

The main melody of the story is credit, money, and passion. In specific, it is DEMO's credit versus TechCrunch's money, plus passion from the attended companies.

The focused debate (apparently) between the two organizations is the $18,500 demonstrator fee required by DEMO for each selected company versus free attendance for every selected TechCrunch50 company. Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, even shared with the media by saying that "Demo needs to die." Is TechCrunch an angel fighting to the evil old dragon DEMO? Certainly not. Both sides are equally businessmen/women.

Many people has been distracted by Arrington's comparison between "pay to play" and free to play. Even Chris Shipley herself defended palely by only repeating that "the fees may well establish those that pay it as serious about their products in the minds of the press and venture capitalists that attend." Fair argument, but less than strong and convincible enough.

In fact, Shipley should ask the question back directly and clearly---isn't the admission to DEMO worth more than $18,500?

Moreover, Shipley should add---any successful (or at least claimed to be successful) businessman/woman should have the ability to convert the DEMO admission ticket to at least $18,500 endorsement, it is a demonstration to both of their passion to the product and their business skill of marketing!

On the basis of the 18-year-success credit, DEMO and Shipley can exclaim the previous two points in loud voice. The credit of their conference is worth more than the money they ask. And the money they ask is not at all a debt but instead providing a chance for young entrepreneurs to show the world that they are not only passionate to the product but also ready to be real businesspersons.

On the other hand, by waiving such a fee, TechCrunch50 also waives a chance to help young entrepreneurs raise their ability of decidability, which is far more important and valuable for the young entrepreneurs in a long term than being waived an amount of $18,500. It is an ability to survive under pressure and an ability to extend a business by grasping a tiny oppotunity such as an admission ticket to DEMO.

For venture capitalists, if there are two young startups,
    1) both of them have good product with great potential,
    2) neither of them has money,
         and hence ...
    3) one decides to go for the free TechCrunch50,
    4) the other one decides to use the DEMO admission ticket to raise $18,500 endorsement and attend DEMO,
Question: which one would you pick to invest if you can invest only one of them?

The one that takes the pressure and has demonstrated its ability of converting a tiny chance to business success deserves being given a prior consideration.

Please allow me quoting myself to conclude the post. Free is a nice feature, but free is not always good and healthy for the growth. Some time, and many times, paid demonstrates more than free, especially when it is a time for demonstration!

DiSCo '08: The 1st International Workshop on Data Semantics in Social Computing Systems

DiSCo '08 is a new workshop that focuses on the research of data management with the background of social computing and data semantics. It is another attempt of bridging the gap between Semantic Web and Web 2.0.

I am one of the PC co-chairs of the workshop. Along with me are James Caverlee from Texas A&M University and Ying Ding from University of Innsbruck. Besides, we are honored to have Stefan Decker from National University of Ireland and Ling Liu from Georgia Institute of Technology as the general chairs of the workshop.

The workshop is affiliated with OTM 2008, which will be holden at Monterrey, Mexico from November 9 to November 14, 2008.

The deadline of paper submission is June 30, 2008 (two months from today) and you are more than welcomed to submit your papers to the workshop. You can find the details of paper submission guidelines at here. Look forward to seeing your work!

Web Evolution

(last updated, June 10th, 2008)

Many people agree on Web evolution, but few take it seriously. As a term, "Web evolution" is commonly used. But few people have thoughtfully studied its principles, i.e. why and how the Web evolves. Even after the initiative of Web Science, Web evolution, supposed to be a major branch of Web Science, is still lack of considerable attention. For example, Wikipedia, the most popular online encyclopedia, does not have an entry of Web evolution till now (last checked June 10th, 2008). We need to change this situation.

A Brief History

One of the early attempts of formalizing the concept of evolution on the Web was done by Tim Berners-Lee, the father of World Wide Web. In 1998, he explained the importance of evolvability of Web technology. In short, we need to preserve spaces for Web technologies so that they can be continuously upgraded to compromise new requests. According to Tim, "evolvability" is one of the two fundamental goals of all W3C technologies (the other goal is "Interoperability"). Berners-Lee also emphasized that the key evolutionary issues at the meantime should be language evolution and data evolution. Within the context of his discussion, the term "evolvable" was actually closer to the meaning of "extensible" than the meaning of "evolutionary".

A more recent discussion about Web evolution was at the panel "Meaning on the Web: Evolution or Intelligent Design?" at Edinburgh, Unite Kingdom during the WWW-2006 conference. This panel invited five well-known web researchers, Ron Brachman, Dan Connolly, Rohit Khare, Frank Smadja, and Frank van Harmelen. In the description of this panel, it was written as follows.

"should meaning on the Web be evolutionary, driven organically through the bottom-up human assignment of tags? Or does it need to be carefully crafted and managed by a higher authority, using structured representations with defined semantics?"

The evolution of meaning specifications on the Web is a central issue of Web evolution; and this issue is particularly critical to the vision of Semantic Web. But this panel still did not touch the very core of Web evolution, i.e. what the essential driving force of web evolution is and how this force really drives the Web forward.

Very recently at WWW 2008, we finally have a workshop organized by the WSRI that focused solely on the study of Web evolution. Nevertheless is it a big step forward, most of the accepted papers in the workshop still focuses on describing the various phenomena of Web technology evolution rather than digging the fundamental reasons that drive the progress of Web evolution and how these reasons may drive the Web forward in the future.

Formal Study of Web Evolution

To the best of my knowledge, the article "Evolution of World Wide Web, a historical view and analogical study" is the first attempt to explain the essence of Web evolution on the ground of a theoretical study. The first draft of Part 1 was posted at January 12, 2007, and the first draft of Part 2 was posted at April 27, 2007. The Part 3 is still in progress. The Part 1 describes an analogical comparison between the growth of World Wide Web and the growth of humans. The Part 2 makes a scientific abstraction of the analogy discussed in Part 1 and concludes a view of Web evolution by two postulates and seven corollaries. Furthermore, in Part 2 we have also applied the newly abstracted Web-evolution theory to predict the path towards the next-generation Web (or Web 3.0 in someone's mind).

We have taken a great deal of effort to write and revise the articles. But it is simply too broad and sophisticated project to make it perfect in short time. Hence at the same time, I have authored a compact series about Web evolution in ten installments here at Thinking Space (the whole list of the post is attached at the end of this post). This series is more updated than the original article.

Brief Summary of the Web Evolution Theory

If World Wide Web does evolve, we believe that the progress of Web evolution must obey the general law of Transformation of Quantity into Quality, which is a general law of any evolutionary process in the world. In particular to the case of Web evolution, the general law is shown as a spiral advancement that consists of unstopping quantitative accumulation of Web resources and successive qualitative stage transitions. On the Web, whenever the quantity of Web resources reaches a certain level so that the amount becomes too many to be efficiently operated by the Web resource operating mechanism at the meantime, the Web will demand an upgrade of Web resource operating mechanism (a qualitative transition) to ensure the continuity of Web evolution. After the qualitative transition is done, the Web then start a new round of quantitative accumulation of Web resources at a higher level. The transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 is a typical example of this theory.

Although the general law of Transformation of Quantity into Quality explains the path of Web evolution, it does not explain the reasons beneath the unstopping quantitative accumulation of Web resources. In other words, why does such a unstopping quantitative accumulation of Web resources happen and never stop? The answer to this question is related to the human aspect of World Wide Web. To the end, World Wide Web is a project produced by humans, contributed by humans, and serving humans.

The fundamental power of unstopping human contribution to the Web is laid on a nature of mankind---the desire of being known when alive and still being remembered after death. Human is a social creature. The invention of World Wide Web helps satisfy the deep concern of humanity itself. This fulfillment is the fundamental momentum that drives the resource accumulation on the Web.

This theory of Web evolution is not flawless. Many arguments might be debatable and amendable. The main purpose of this work is to bring the world a fresh new vision of Web evolution. In fact, Web evolution is not just about the Web, it is indeed about all humans and our society.

A View of Web Evolution

1. In the Beginning …
2. Three Evolutionary Elements
3. Two Postulates
4. Web Evolution and Human Growth
5. Evolutionary Stage
6. Qualities of Evolutionary Stages
7. Trigger of Transition
8. Beginning of a Stage Transition
9. Essence of Web Evolution
10. Completion of a Stage Transition

CFP: ESWC-2007 Workshop on Bridging the Gap between Semantic Web and Web 2.0

Here comes a new workshop targeting the research on bridging the Semantic Web and Web 2.0. This workshop is co-located with ESWC-2007.

"Web 2.0 is what happened while we were waiting for the Semantic Web." This was what Dion Hinchcliffe stated on Last November. I highly appreciate this statement because it is a keen observation of the web evolution. We do look for the realization of Semantic Web. But in practice we find that the Semantic Web might not be set up by some elite researchers and scientists. In contrast, it is more realistic to build it from the grass-root. That is, we ask for the help from every normal web user and make the construction of Semantic Web be an aggregation of massive human practices. From this bottom-up approach, we get Web 2.0 (but not Semantic Web yet).

The question now becomes how we can learn valuable lessons from the success of Web 2.0 and apply them to the realization of the Semantic Web. This is thus the theme of this upcoming ESWC workshop. As a PC member, I am really interested in this topic. At the same time, I would like to suggest anyone who is also interested in this topic to try to submit a paper and participate to this event. This will be a very interesting one and Innsbruck is a very beautiful city.

Ultra-scale Information Management: no place for rigid standards

This year's ER conference (International Conference on Conceptual Modeling) was hold on Tucson, Arizona, from Nov. 6 to Nov. 9. This year's ER is special since it is the 25th anniversary. Hence the organizers have prepared a few special events. To me, however, the best experience about ER 2006 was listening to a great talk given by Scott Renner from the MITRE Corporation.

Scott's talk is about "Community Semantics For Ultra-Scale Information Management." Here is the abstract.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) presents an instance of an ultra-scale information management problem: thousands of information systems, millions of users, billions of dollars for procurement and operations. Military organizations are often viewed as the ultimate in rigid hierarchical control. In fact, authority over users and developers is widely distributed, and centralized control is quite difficult – or even impossible, as many of the DoD core functions involve an extended enterprise that includes completely independent entities, such as allied military forces, for-profit corporations, and non-governmental organizations. For this reason, information management within the DoD must take place in an environment of limited autonomy, one in which influence and negotiation are as necessary as top-down direction and control.

This presentation examines the DoD’s information management problems in the context of its transformation to network-centric warfare The key tenent of NCW holds that “seamless” information sharing leads to increased combat power. We examine several implications of the net-centric transformation and show how each depends upon shared semantic understanding within communities of interest. Opportunities for research and for commercial tool development in the area of conceptual modeling will be apparent as we go along.

The promise of successful information sharing is "when the right information is provided to the right people at the right time and place so that they can make the right decisions" [1]. To protect these five rights (right information, right people, right time, right place, and right decision), the DoD practice has proved that the top-down standardization approach can be partial success, but overall failure for ultra-scale information management systems. When the scale of an information system gets to be big, single vocabulary simply does not work any more, even if it is for a very much rigidly organized army environment.

Straightforwardly, this conclusion leads to another prediction. To the scale of World Wide Web, where (1) the number of web users is much greater than the number of soldiers, (2) the entire domain is much more complicated and significantly greater than the domain of military, and (3) there is no enforced power over the Web, absolutely there is no chance of success if we plan to design any standard for global information sharing, such as, the Semantic Web.

Information is more than data. Scott presented an interesting point: information is about data and how this data is understood. When data itself is objective, understanding the meanings of data can be varied with respect to different people. Varied understanding of meanings thus may lead to complete different decisions based on, however, the same data. Hence it is necessary to separate the two different types of information representations. What is the data is different from what is the data for.

Let's look at Semantic Web again. In order to build a real Semantic Web, data in the Semantic Web must be existing, accessible, visible, and understandable. Existing means data values or/and data descriptions must have been created. Accessible means created data presentation must be deliverable to its correct destination by legal requests. Visible means data representation can be watched and identified by humans. Understandable means data representation can be correctly and unambiguously identified by machines.

Ostensibly, one issue that is overlooked by the current Semantic Web research is the relationship between visible and understandable. Many current Semantic Web practices assume what machines understand must be what everybody expects; or on the other way they assume that a small group's vision of a domain can be a standard description of the domain for machines to perform. As what the DoD project has demonstrated, the previous assumptions are impractical in the real world ultra-scale applications, even if they are for the army scenario.

Semantic Web researchers must start to learn from Web 2.0 practices. A public domain agreement cannot be enforced in general. The enforcement model might be executable for a small domain and for a limited number of domain participants. But the model can never be scale to large size such as the entire Web. This difficulty of scalability lays not only inside the theory of conceptual modeling, which no doubt is a hard problem, but also in the intrinsic human expectation of freedom, which makes the difficult problem be essentially unsolvable.

[1] Scott Renner, Net-Centric Information Management, 8th Int. C2 Research and Technology Symposium, McLean VA, 2005.

Referenced resources:

• 25th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER2006), Tucson, Arizona, USA, November 6-9, 2006
  
• the MITRE Corporation