” We were given an imperative from our business leaders to provide a friendlier and more collaborative front end on our metadata…

… This in turn led us to MediaWiki and the rich and diverse array of add-ons developed by the Open Source community, particularly its semantic extensions.”

I was happy to play a small part in this project last summer.   I suppose I was more of kibitzer than anything else, but It was enjoyable to solve a few problems for the team as well as get an inside look into this very interesting project.

Oblique aerial view of my house from the south

Pictometry creates and provides oblique aerial imagery combined with geospatial data to deliver unique mapping applications to it’s customers. Not sure what that means? Well in plain english here’s how it works. The guys from Pictometry fly their airplanes in a pattern over an area of interest. All the while taking digital pictures of what’s below and storing these images with the geospatial data that represents exactly where the image was taken. Now you may be wondering what makes this different from satellite photos. The difference is that the images are take at an angle instead of straight down. (this is the “oblique” part) And a single location is photographed 4 times from 4 different points of view (east, north, south and west).  Finally the images are later combined into large browsable maps.

Pictometry has developed their own software application (Pictometry online) to view this data for their customers. For some examples of what these images look like take a look at the Pictometry Image Gallery.  Another way is to browse bing.com.  For example follow this link and take a look at the Sydney Opera House. In the upper left you will see some control gadgets. Hover your mouse over “Aerial” then from the drop down menu choose “Birds eye view”. You should now see an what is called an oblique aerial image. You can even rotate the view, north south east and west. Compare this with the other option that gives you a satellite view. A satellite view only gives you an image looking directly down.

My house from a satellite photograph

The advantages of oblique aerial photography are many including the obvious that you can see the sides of buildings, not just the roof.  Another advantage is that we can  combine the imagery from 4 different angles give us a rich data set that lets us explore an object of interest in 3 dimensions, and in some cases construct 3D models of an object on the ground.

Another big advantage is the use of oblique aerial photography in public safety and law enforcement.  Here’s an interesting story of a man who tracked his stolen iphone using a combination of location based technologies including Apple’s Find My iPhone service and Pictometry images from bing.com to see the location where the phone had been take to.

There are many more potential applications, imagine the possibilities as the number and types of ground imagery increases Just how much of the planet has been mapped with Pictometry’s images?  As I understand it today the Majority of US metropolitan regions and more than 1,500 cities around the world have been mapped by Pictometry.  It’s an impressive portfolio. Although there are a lot open spaces between cities that are not mapped today this too may change as the application list for what we can do with this technology grows.  I’m happy to say I’m really looking forward to being a part of developing these some of these new applications. I think it’s going to be a real  challenge and a lot of fun.

Collaborative computing and the next steps that will evolve as traditional corporate email crosses paths with mobile devices, social media sites, instant messaging, knowledge matrices, and keyword tagging. Vendor independent discussion of everything from iPhone, Blackberry Enterprise Server, Lotus Notes & Domino, Exchange, Google Apps for Enterprise, and email compliance and archiving solutions. Beyond Messaging is solely the work of veteran collaborative computing specialist Marianne Case.

Ok, so I admit, I may be related to this particular blogger, but hey genius runs in the family I’m sure…  You go sister.

The fun part of architecting  this new site has been the rapid design cycle enabled by Drupal and all it’s myriad modules and theming capabilites. Got an idea in the morning? You can see it implemented by the afternoon.  Or maybe even in a few minutes depending on the situation.   Drupal ( or I should say Drupal and all it’s companion modules) succeeds because the granularity in component construction is at the web design pattern  level.  If a good idea for the web has been thought of, there is probably a Drupal module to support it.

Calais for semantic tagging and we’ve added Facebook Connect to the site, both work well.  We’ve also successfully integrated with NPR and PBS, we pull feeds fresh headlines from NPR news every day using their API and you can watch some of your favorite shows now, right from your web browser in very good quality video. There’s much more, but too much to list here. All I can say is check it out and let us know what you think.

Looking ahead I’ve been thinking about how to offer more services around Semantic Wikis and what potential customers might want when engaging a consultant in this area.  It’s an area worth pondering because building applications with SWM changes the game of software development a bit.  For one things it’s a lot faster to develop SMW applications and it’s a bit easier. However it still requires good old fashioned thinking.  Also it requires combining skill sets from a variety of traditional areas in software development.  In a phrase I could say “traditional software engineering skills still apply”.

What do I mean by this?  Well here’s a quick  list off the top of my head of the skills I’ve been using and sometimes  redefining (or at least refining) as I build or help others build these semantic applications in a wiki environment.

• A good head for requirements analysis.
• Techniques for building semantic models to jump start the design.
• A standard approach to prototyping that establishes the basic framework of the application
• Inclusion of traditional web site design techniques to cover all the bases of building a usable application.
• And a complete development methodology that is agile and includes the customer on a regular basis.

Does this approach work?  So far it seems to be. The only other thing I think I can add to this at the moment is that when developing Semantic MediaWiki applications there seems to be a recurring need for what I can only call “applied cleverness”.  What do I mean by this? Well it’s hard to say without being specific, but lets just say that the rising tide of new web 2.0/3.0 tools and techniques that are available today are continually inspiring me to combine these tools in new ways that (I believe) have never been done before.  There is a tremendous amount of “invention” going on today in this industry.  And it’s a heck of a lot of fun to be a part of it.  But now I’m wandering into a new topic so I’ll stop here and save this for another post yet to come.

Ok so as I understand it the real value of the emerging semantic web (once fully realized) will be the new ability to share, harvest, read, process, and “reason over” the world’s published knowledge programmatically.  The alternative is, well, rather disconcerting, How many monkeys can you muster to sit and read the web and make sense of it to get what you need today? Not many I’ll suggest, monkeys are not cheep and they eat a lot. And yet that is just what businesses are doing today. The number of “knowledge workers” in the modern business office place goes up and up each year. Where do all these people get their information in the “information age”. The answer:  First scan the web, maybe pick up the phone. Honestly think about, when you need an answer where does your hand go first? The door knob? The phone? Or the Mouse?

Is the new paradigm still new?

Here’s the rapidly emerging issue, the new paradigm of gather knowledge (and thus power) from the web is also the old paradigm that must become obsolete.  It is the old paradigm in the sense that burning up valuable “human eyeball time” scanning for information on the web is just not very efficient.  We need a better way.

The consensus of this need represents itself in many ways. The shear mountainous popularity of Google is, (obvious again) a vote in favor of the validity of this need. In this Google Tech talk Doug Lenat from Cycorp points out the limitations of Google;  just try and ask Google a question like “Which is taller the Space Needle or the Eiffel tower?” Doug goes on to describe how (in 2006 )  Google returns no reasonable answer.  I tried it today and the first hit led me to an answer.  Or did it?

Did Google really answer the question?  Sadly no, we only get lucky (or think we did) because someone created a forum post with the same question in the title, so we get a match.  Guess what, if the forum post did not really resolve to an answer we still fail.  How many times has this happened to you?  (And by the way how willing are you to trust an answer from a forum post)

Good answers are hard to find

So you still can’t really get a reliable answer with out some manual work on your own sorting out bits and pieces from the search results and then doing some verification (or some math).  It should be dirt simple for computers to answer these sorts of questions in a reliable fashion. But today it is not.

One step closer is Wolfram Alpha.  Doug Lenat is Bullish on Wolfram alpha and so am I. I played around with it the other day and had surprisingly good results, This tool has great potential and sports a reasonable amount of DWIM (Do what I mean, not what I say).  However today I asked the Space Needle /Eiffel Tower question there and lo and behold it’s… not understanding me. I type in the exact phrase “Which is taller the space needle or the Eiffel Tower?” and I get back “Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.”  Ok, but I’m willing to try again…so I enter “Space Needle Eiffel Tower”.  Aha I get results. A very nicely formatted page with facts and maps about each tower and it is complete with height values.  Very cool.

But the current limitation is that Wolfram alpha did not understand English grammar well enough.  Optimistically speaking this should be doable today; We can write programs that parse simple sentence structures in question format.  It’s not always guaranteed to work perfectly but I think the folks at wolfram alpha should be able to do better and I’m sure they will.

The ultimate answering machines cometh

Meanwhile similar but different solutions are on the way. Google has announced Google Squared.  Tech Crunch is quick to claim it will  “Crush wolfram alpha“. And  Paul, (The Content Guy) is quick to reminds us that we should all calm down because Google Squared is not the same as Wolfram alpha., and therefore should not be compared head to head and presented as an either/or choice.  Indeed I agree, it isn’t the same. And as those annoying optimists are so quick to say;  “It’s all good”. Anyway I don’t think “really smart” search engines are the end of this story. What is the end game for sites like Ask.com, Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared? Sites who’s motivation, reason for being, is being in the game of helping people get to an answer to a question. What might the ideal “well of web wisdom” look like?  Well here’s what I want, imagine this if you will;  a web site that can answer my questions and:

• Do a reasonable job at natural language interpretation
• Provide suggested questions when mine is not understood (i.e “Did you mean…” on  steroids)
• Truly assemble real quality answers with associated facts and links.
• Draw material from the vast semantically rich web when needed.
• Draw on large Linked Open Data sources when needed.
• Provide links to soruces for verification
• Provide deep linking to other, possibly more relevant, sites that focus on vertical domains for a deep dive. (engineering, health, sciences, etc.).
• And so on…

Sound unrealistic?, I don’t think so.  This is not utpoian at all at this point.  No not at all utopian. And  once we have these kinds of resources, the cost of hunting around for information will be greatly reduced saving us time, money and monkeys, and we may just find we have more time to pick up the phone again and call a friend, or even (heaven forbid) reach for the door.

The big event that marks this on the calendar (this last Tuesday) is Google’s announcement of support for microformats and RDFa, which they call rich snippets.  And the support of both formats is interesting I believe the  support for RDFa may be of somewhat more significance. To be clear I really think  this is the “beginning” of a significant transition period of sorts that may take a year or so.  I have observed that major sea changes of this nature don’t happen overnight.  For example the web was technically fully functional in the 92/93 time frame. But it wasn’t until 94/95 that the wave of popularity started to swell. I believe it will take a year or two for the tide to fully change the course of the web semantically as well, but it will.  You can’t stop the tide short of blowing up the moon.  And in this case the moon is Google. And by semantic change I mean that a vast majority of “actively developed” web sites ( in an approximately mere two year time span) will contain a rich variety of  structured data that is both readable by humans and discoverable by machines.

So how does all this happen in such a big way?  The key to understanding this level of change is human behavior, not technology.  The technology is simple and it turns out that’s almost a requirement for major change.  Making fire is simple, the wheel is simple, bicycles are simple and telephones believe it or not is pretty simple ( got some tin cans?)  And so it goes that the basics of the web html and http are pretty simple and so is RDFa and microformats.

It’s all about human behavior

So what’s the behavior game here? Well it turns out that the behavioral needs also have to be simple for mass adoption.  We all get cold (fire), we all have to move heavy stuff (wheels) and we all need to get places. (bicycles).  Well on the web there is a simple need, we all need to get noticed.  The need for search engine optimization (SEO) will drive this change. In this case it is the behavior of the people (and their tools) that publish on the web that are the change agent.  It’s really that simple. The sequence is surprisingly predictable.

The first generation will be (and probably already have been) hand coding rich snippets into web pages. Next will come the changes in the tools. (actually already underway) Web publication tools with built in functionality to easily insert rich snippets will make it painless and invite the technical and non-technical publishers alike. SEO marketing wonks will then start to talk about <deep voice>”how important it is”</deep voice>to add rich snippets and finally it will become just the way pages are authored and not even mentioned much.  When was the last time you heard any web authors talk about inserting meta data keywords in their work?  You don’t hear about that much but you can bet all the good developers do this best practice regularly. It’s just “how it’s done”.  In some ways it’s all very reminiscent of how RSS took off.

As all this happens the back end applications start to blossom and provide very large rich data sets for new semantically enabled search and discovery tools, which in turn feeds back to drive more people to populate their web sites with semantically rich data. It’s a positive feedback loop that ramps up in a big way. Oh and don’t forget the VC begin to take notice as well, pumping more dollars and energy into the system. Google may may lead the way in terms of popular drive but you can be sure that a whole host of others have been and will be finding ways to leverage the semantically enabled web for other purposes.

Is it really that simple?

And so the behavior changes.  Or does it.  Well now comes the messy part. Change is messy and right off the bat there will be naysayers, and thankfully so.  Because the first implementation will not be perfect, and there will be much thrashing of ideas opinions and gnashing of teeth, and this is how stuff  gets done on the Internet (and where all the fun is.)    Bloggers will complain,  for example already today I read reasonable critiques of Google’s intentions but then again read their readers responses, the perceived problems are probably not insurmountable. Then later the big players start making public statements this way or that and so it goes. The key thing is that the developer dialogue continues to unfold, course corrections are made, and stuff gets better. Huzaah!

And for me well I’ll be watching this closely and of course my site should support RDFa now shouldn’t it. It already has a bunch of RDF metadata, (see my previous post from last year.) I supoose now I must venture on and try out some of the RDFa and microformat solutions for WordPress right here on this blog.  Hello? (tap tap) Google? Can you here me now?

“The Obama administration recently excited the world of open source software by choosing to launch recovery.gov on Drupal. Their choice of a free, open source platform over any proprietary system is as hopeful and promising as the purpose of the website they built, which is to lend transparency to the spending of the $800 billion dollar economic stimulus money. We should be happy both that the U.S. government is embracing open software, and that it is promoting Open Data…”

via Where Open Source, Open Data and government meet | Dries Buytaert.