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The Finch and the Raccoon

Submitted by administrator on Thu, 06/05/2008 - 12:34.

The blogs on xml.com are down so I have reposed this here.

Have you ever wondered if the laws of evolution apply to computer languages? When you walk down the isle at your favorite bookstore, does it seam like there are actually more computer languages than last year? What forces are driving each of these new languages to evolve?

In 1835 Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands. There he collected what he thought were about a dozen distinct species of birds. Upon returning to England he discovered that each of these species had evolved from a single species of finches. On the various Galapagos Islands the requirements for food gathering was different, but consistent over hundreds of thousands of years. Enough time for a single species to adapt to meet consistent requirements.

Consider the Raccoon: omnivores that have proved to be one of the most adaptable mammals on Earth. The Raccoon’s range has rapidly expanded into urban areas due to their ability to quickly adapt to new requirements before other animals have had time for the wheels of evolution to turn.

So goes it with computer languages. Some procedural languages can be quickly adapted to fill in the needs for a new niche. When the web was young, procedural languages like Java and JavaScript quickly filled in the need for a variety of tasks. As the requirements for building web applications stabilized, declarative systems like CSS, XForms and XQuery started to push procedural languages back into niche-areas. As these declarative languages stabilize and become worldwide standards, graphical tools are being created to allow non-programmers to create, manipulate and extend these systems.

This is why many of us believe their will always be some need for procedural programming, but certainly not for building standard web applications that are controlled by style sheets and user interaction forms. Like the finch, declarative languages need a little longer to evolve. It sometimes takes years for a small vocabulary of functional specification patterns to emerge and be given labels. Additionally, it can takes years for the standards bodies to agree on the best way to deliver these new languages in a set of semantically precise data elements that have unambiguous interpretations. Finally, it may take another few years for IT managers to realized that they really do lower costs if they avoid vendor-specific implementations and adopt worldwide standards.

When CSS first came out you may have been a little reluctant to let web designers play with a rules engine. As XForms becomes ubiquitous you may be resisting change because you have invested so much time and energy learning how to debug JavaScript (without a debugger). You can not hold back the forces of evolution…and now we all need to adapt to the declarative world or risk our own extinction.

If you are interested in more on this topic see my Presentation from the 2007 Semantic Technology Conference The Semantics of Declarative Systems

Impressions of Sem-Tech -07

Submitted by administrator on Tue, 05/29/2007 - 15:21.

Impressions of Sem-Tech -07

I just returned from the 2007 Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose California. It was a great conference and opened my mind to several new ideas. Well worth the time!

The conference was held over four days and had over around 125 presentations including tutorials and research projects. There were almost 800 attendees. This is the third semantic technology conference that I attended and the second that I presented a paper at.

Here are some high-level observations and some patterns that I detected.

The Semantic Web gets the “Web 3.0” Label

Most people at the conference have tried to embrace the idea that the semantic web will be adopting the popular culture label “Web 3.0”. The final straw was the Nov 2006 NYT article by John Markoff which set the blogosphere is a buzz. This was a web that includes technologies to enable intelligent reuse of data. Wikipedia, after a long pro-active discussion about if “Web 3.0” deserved an entry, finally undeleted the page and let is stand. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_3.0 and check out the discussion page on the article for more.

From If to When to How

Eric Miller (now at Zepheira) calls some of the new technologies “recombinant data. Eric spent about five years with the w3c. He is perhaps the most well-connected person in the world with accurate knowledge of who is using semantic web technologies to solve real business problems today. His observation was that three years ago at the first semantic technology we were wondering if the semantic web would take off. Last year the speculation was when the semantic web technologies would start to become common place. This year the focus was debates on how the semantic web should be implemented.

Venture Capitalists are Becoming Educated on the Semantic Web

One example of this is the fact that last year, most semantic-web startup companies had to carefully explain what the semantic web was to venture capital companies when trying to get their initial rounds of funding. This year, many venture capital companies not-only had some level of understanding of the semantic web but were asking each of their potential startups how their technologies fit into the semantic web. Other companies that did not have a semantic-web focus were not coming to the conference to get educated.

Some of the companies that got VC last year have already been purchased and absorbed by larger firms. These companies were replaced by new venture-funded companies.

Consensus on the RDF/SPARQL Foundation

One of the first things that struck me was the consistent use of RDF and triple-stored to solve many hard problems. The use of RDF and SPARQL seemed to be the primary distinguishing factor about if people thought you were really using semantic web technologies or not. If you we not using RDF, you were not really in the club, just and outsider looking in.

OWL Fragmentation

Another thing that also surprised me was the discord about the use of OWL and its relative sub-functions. Central to this was the rise of use-cases of simple things examples of things that OWL could not do. Much of this centered around DLP (Data Log Programming).

A good example of a non-OWL solution was the use of SKOS to store things typically stored in a metadata registry. SKOS is a great example of a simple standard, built on top of RDF that attempts to solve common problems without getting overly complex. See SKOS in Wikipedia.

We are also starting to see that rules must also be exchanged between systems in semantically precise ways. The need for a Rule Interchange Format (RIF). Nice to see vendors like FairIssac supporting complex business rules running INSIDE the web browser using XForms. They rock!

REST is Deep

Perhaps my favorite presentation was given by David Wood and Brian Sletten from Zepheria. In this presentation, David and Brian gave a demo of the NetKernel system. They demonstrated how NetKernel embraces REST at a much deeper level then I had previously anticipated. Now they were not yet generating XForms from an XML Schema but it showed a great example of convergent evolution of my ideas and theirs.

Case Studies

This year also started to show examples of new startup companies actually using semantic web technologies to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. Although because they are all trying to differentiate themselves, much of the actual technologies they were using was not disclosed.

RDF Taggers, Harvesters, Linkers and Analyzers

The conference seemed to have three sets of problems that everyone agreed on. First was how do you harvest RDF from a web page or any other resource. Most of these presentations related to getting RDF out of un-structured and structured data. Lots of discussion of microformats (pros and cons).

iReader Rocks

The coolest demo I saw was the iReader demo from http://www.syntactica.com. This is an awesome FireFox (and IE) extension that does concept mapping from unstructured text. The people behind this have been doing research on linguistics for about 40 years and have only recently got a round of venture capital to start to publicize this tool. But they are not yet converting to RDF for storage other systems.

URL Design Patterns

One common themes that came up was the need for best practices about good URL design. Everyone said a few things: The design of URLs is very important, most people screw it up the first time and then have to redo the designs, there are not a lot of good documents out there and the ones that are available are at least five years old. The people from the w3c did take notes on this.

Reception of My Paper

My presentation was titled “The Semantics of Declarative Systems”. This talk covered how by using a set of small languages with precise semantics, you can build entire applications that allow non-programmers to draw pictures of their business requirements and generate working Apps. The purpose of this talk was really to test the metaphors on how I could explain these concepts to non-computer scientists. I got some positive feedback and was happy to see convergent evolution of our designs with other organizations.

The URL to the paper is here:

http://www.danmccreary.com/presentations/sem-web-07

Metaphors for Declarative Systems

Submitted by administrator on Fri, 04/06/2007 - 14:31.

I am working on my presentation for the 2007 semantic technology conference. My topic is the semantics of declarative languages.



I am attempting to present to business strategists that may not appreciate how powerful the new XForms and XQuery standards are and how entire rich user experience web 2.0 applications can be built using these tools as long as the tools have RESTful interfaces.



My first consideration is to find the right metaphors. I am working with the evolution metaphor and the puzzle metaphor right now and it seems to be working well.



I have also done some research on Domain Specific Languages and I see that they have also used the evolution metaphor but I find that they are focused on building small languages that are specific to a group or project and they don't really look at the external semantics of the problem.



Please write me if you are also trying to explain the business benefits of either declarative languages to a non-technical audience and if you have found metaphors that get the key points across.




Thanks! - Dan

Computers Don't Create Models (Today) – People Do

Submitted by administrator on Thu, 02/15/2007 - 20:12.

I had several good comments about my posting about the increasing role of
semantics in the "Era of Tera". I did not mention some of the key
concepts that the Intel paper discussed and the impact these concepts
will have on IT strategy. Here is an excerpt:

The problem is ordinary computers don't model things. Aside from
supercomputers, today's computers aren't capable of developing
mathematical models of complex objects, systems or processes. Nor are
they powerful or fast enough to perform such tasks at speeds people
demand. We can't plug in a statistical model for a rare malignant
tumor or the behavioral pattern of a shoplifting employee and search
for similar instances of the model in a data set. To benefit from the
wealth of data building up in the world, we need to be able to
communicate with computers in more abstract terms (high-level concepts
or semantics). We need to speak in terms of models.

I believe that the core problem is that there will be a HUGE demand
for highly-skilled data-modelers/ontologists in five years. But there
will not be a large supply since this skill is not something that can
be learned from a single class in college. Rather it is more of a
tacit skill that is not easily codifiable.

That being said, there are many best practices that ARE codifiable.
You can already purchase books on OWL/RDF and metadata registries,
although most of them are mired in relational database models or
written by academics with little real-world experience. You can read the Wikipedia articles on “Data Stewardship”. What is still
needed is a single set of best practices and tools for creating
families of machine-readable data models that can be use as a basis
for creating exchange models. And we need to do this without having to learn how to represent all 12 types of UML diagrams in XMI and transform them. The NIEM subset generator is a good example of the solid XML-Schema-driven front-end of this process of selecting elements from a metadata registry and putting them in your shopping cart.

The bottom line is that this is really about empowerment. And unless organizations introduce semantic web technologies into their organizations at a grass-root level and support them at the CEO level, many organizations will be left behind in the Era of the Tera.