Connecting Things - Continued

Experience in research and developing the research website has enables Web researchers to model collaboration and connection. The aim of this is to connect all the research that each person has done with research of others. This enables each person to connect with work they would like to have done themselves or can see they should have done, or should get involved in, but haven't had time. This can help business by allowing the business to clarify what it should focus on while knowing who can provide the othre services it needs. The advantages of this understanding of connections are most obvious in software and web development. This idea of connecting research via web links fits in with this quote from Steve Jobs of Apple "Creativity is just connecting things" (Jobs, 1996).

Further research is needed into providing a linking mechanism for 'snippets' of information. People need answers to particular questions they are asking. In order to get the facts they need it is important for the returned information to contain this. Return of the information as factual snippets that can be pieced together into a report with links to the multiple sources would aid this. The work with semantic technologies and languages such as RDF (Resource Description Framework) (World Wide Web Consortium, 2006) and RSS can assist in this. RDF, and Web Ontology Language (OWL) add a layer of standardisation of semantics, above the standardised syntax of XML (extensible Markup Language) (Bechhofer and Carroll, 2004).

RDF

Structuring information makes it easier to export it to different software systems to make his possible. It also makes it possible to provide visual navigation menus with a tree or graph structure. RDF can be searched using SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol And RDF Query Language) (World Wide Web Consortium, 2006). Because a resource can represent anything, knowledge from any domain can theoretically be represented in RDF. This, and its standardised syntax that allows it to be machine understandable, are the reasons why RDF is such a useful and important technology for the Semantic Web. RDF consists of a resource, a property, and a property value. This triple corresponds to subject, predicate, and object in logic. Each RDF triple represents a fact. A Resource is anything that can have a URI (uniform resource identifier). A URI can look like a web address and can actually be a web address, but this is not always the case, it is a way of representing an entity. A URI consists of the name and location of the entity. An RDF Resource is described through a collection of properties and property values called an RDF Description. RDF provides a mechanism for describing collections, which are special kinds of resources, and a sequence is an ordered collection. A collection does not have to possess its own URI but it can. RDF information can link to further RDF information elsewhere, providing connectivity. This allows resources to be linked to each other indefinitely, which is why it is such an important technology for the Semantic Web. Because it is XML based, an RDF Web page can be linked to an XSL stylesheet to produce a visual representation of the structure This is also explained by (Cayzer, 2004) who uses RDF to provide structure for Semantic blogging. Oren et al (2006) also use this approach of combining RDF and Semantic Seb use with ease of editing in a Semantic Wiki.

RSS

RSS allows web users to more easily find information by subscribing to websites that provide the information they are interested in and update this regularly. RSS is explained in (JISC, 2007) and by Cayzer, (2004) who explains its use in semantic blogging. An RSS feed is a list of articles in the website and a short summary of the article with a link to the full information. Software available on the web or downloadable can track the RSS information for sites the web user subscribes to.

RSS has split into different syntaxes and can stand for RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication, and there is a third alternative called Atom. All of the RSS syntaxes are based on XML and some are also based on RDF. The incompatibilities however do not seem to hinder searches using these formats too much, and use of RSS has become a useful method for making information on the web easier to find.

Tools and browsers are available or becoming available for searching RSS feeds. An example of this is the downloadable Flock Browser (2007) that includes an icon by the web address to indicate an RSS feed is available for that page. RSS and Flock projects are also related to the concept of blogging that gives individuals who may not be computer literate the opportunity to put there thoughts onto a web page without needing to edit HTML. This is a similar concept to that of Wikis such as Wikipedia (2006d). RSS allows for a more structured representation of the contents of a web page or a blog.

Berners-Lee et al (2006) explain "The Web is an engineered space created through formally specified languages and protocols. However, because humans are the creators of Web pages and links between them, their interactions form emergent patterns in the Web at a macroscopic scale." As well as connecting research it is necessary to connect information sources, so this work should be taken further by enabling connectivity between open source ontology, modelling, and visualisation tools, with those tools and applications commonly used in industry and organisations. These applications already hold large amounts of information, sometimes they are legacy applications that have been filled with information for many years.

Sims Learning Connections - Ray Sims - AND AND AND AND (PLE) - Related - http://blog.simslearningconnections.com/?p=50 - Useful and Interesting discussion of Personal Learing, and connecting learning and research.

References

Bechhofer, S., Carrol, J., 2004. Parsing owl dl: trees or triples?. In: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web, NY, USA, pp 266-275.

Berners-Lee, T., Hall, W., Hendler, J., Shadbolt, N., Weitzner, D. J., 2006. Creating a Science of the Web. Science 11 August 2006:Vol. 313. no. 5788, pp. 769 - 771 - http://www.webscience.org/publications/ - Enhanced - http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/313/5788/769?ijkey=o66bodkFqpcCs&keytype=ref&siteid=sci..

Cayzer, S., 2004. Semantic Blogging and Decentralized knowledge Management. Communications of the ACM. Vol. 47, No. 12, Dec 2004, pp. 47-52. ACM Press.

Flock Browser, 2007. the social web browser http://www.flock.com.

JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee). Technology and Standards Watch. 2007. What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/techwatch/tsw0701b.pdf.

Oren, E., Breslin, J. G., Decker, S., 2006. How Semantics Make Better Wikis. In: WWW 2006, May 23-26, 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland.

What creativity is for Steve jobs? It is all about experience connectivity - http://fgiasson.com/blog/index.php/2005/07/23/what_creativity_is_for_steve_jobs_it_is - Quote from Steve Jobs - "Creativity is just connecting things" - Originally from - From Wired Magazine February 1996 Gary Wolf - Reproduced Here - http://romain-moisescot.com/steve/more/interviews/PDFs/1996.pdf.

What Is RSS - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html - O'Reilly XML.com - Mark Pilgrim -December 18, 2002.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), 2006. Resource Description Framework (RDF) http://www.w3.org/RDF/.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), 2006. SPARQL Query Language for RDF http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/.

My Research - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/

Web 2.0 and AJAX page - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/Ajax/ajax.htm

Semantic Web Page - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/RDF/RDF.htm