Semantic & Social Web - What's In It For You?
Here's an excellent slide presentation from Simon Cross and Ben Smith of BBC Future Media and Technology to illustrate a talk about the social semantic side of the BBC they presented last month at Futuresonic 09.
The semantic web is the underlying plumbing that enables linked information, and what this means for you is the ability to find information quickly instead of searching to find individual suggestions from search engines.
The BBC, like most media companies, has a vast archive of assets. Your friends and colleagues will recommend you check something out and you will try and find it.
How could the BBC build social discovery without building out yet another social network?
The solution is to link users to content through activity, and this has major promise for enterprise collaboration, which admittedly typically has less interesting content than the BBC.
It's all about tracking nouns and verbs, say Simon and Ben.
"Simon Watched Top Gear"..."Ben is going to Glastonbury"..."Rich listened to Radiohead"...(can you tell they're in England!?)
Their six steps to heaven if you want your data to be findable and interconnected:
• Structure your data • Publish as linked open data • Capture Activity (User interactions with your data) • Derive meaning from this activity and the social graph • Publish derivations back to the user • Bingo! Users can find newer, better interlinked contextual content much more easily
Head on over to Paul Miller's great semantic web blog for the serious understanding of the underlying semantic structure, I'm closely following linked data on the basis of 'what's in it for me and my clients'.
I'll be at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose next week - if you're attending tweet me and/or say hello - and will be exploring further.
The underpinnings of all this are that Bing and other commercial search solutions are entirely dependent on linked data stores to work, and it will be up to you to determine if it's worth plugging all your common information into sites like Freebase.
Tim Berners Lee thinks you should - that's good enough for me, so do I.