I am at the airport, waiting for my flight to the UK… on my way to Glastonbury 08. Although some rain is expected again, it doesn’t seem it’s going to be as muddy as last time.

(source BBC Weather)

The LinkedData Planet 2008 conference is now over. I think it’s the first industry conference on the Semantic Web (or at least amongst the first few). I was invited by the good folks of the New York Semantic Web Meetup Group to participate in a panel discussion. Tim Berners-Lee was a surprise addition to the panel and was siting next to me.

You can always count on Savas to disagree in public with major figures in the community :-) It was an interesting discussion, which I very much enjoyed. I do hope the folks who stayed till 8.30pm to hear what we had to say enjoyed it too.

I think that the Semantic Web community has a huge hammer, which happens to be a good one (e.g. RDF, OWL), and everything looks like a nail. I am personally more interested in the “semantic” part of the “Semantic Web” space. I see the latter as an ecosystem of technologies to enable the representation and management of information/knowledge facts. They are just technologies. Through the work I am currently focusing with people like Evelyne Viegas, I am trying to showcase the value of semantic computing (internally to Microsoft and externally).

It’s fantastic that the W3C is working towards standards, which are a great way to achieve interoperability. However, the world won’t switch overnight. The Microsoft Research team, of which I am part, will do its absolutely best to support as many of those standards as possible in our works, within the limits of the resources we have available.

There is already a lot of information out there; some of it is already structured (e.g. microformats, data adhering to domain-specific vocabularies and captured in XML, etc.) but most of it is unstructured. We can make use of the structured information directly and apply machine learning, latent semantics, entity extraction, etc. techniques to create structure where none exists. We could then demonstrate the value of what is possible if all information was represented in a structured manner (e.g. information inferencing, reasoning, better machine learning, arbitrary information correlation, etc. over the Web), effectively realizing Tim’s vision of the Giant Global Graph :-), or what I’ve been calling over time as “Web Overlays”, “Data Networking”, “Data Mesh”; they all refer to the same thing… a huge graph of knowledge facts that spans the Web, the graph of all computer-representable, interconnected information.

Over time, more and more information and knowledge will be structured, perhaps with the W3C standards being used as the pervasive formats. I think there is more value to be gained by trying to demonstrate the value of semantics-oriented computing rather than trying to persuade everyone out there to use RDF; that will come over time.

I think Tim misunderstood the example I tried to give during the panel discussion. I am a believer in that little semantics can take as long way. So I tried to make the argument that Google’s PageRank algorithm makes use of the global graph of hypermedia links as part of its service. If you think about it, Google has created a huge graph based on facts expressed as triples (URI links-to URI) and applies various relevance algorithms on top of that. Does it matter that the graph is not represented in RDF? Nope! The important thing is that information is inferred from what’s out there and a great service is offered as a result. It’s the linking semantics captured in HTML that are used in Google’s algorithms. And that’s just a simple example.

My position is that we should take advantage of all the information and representations we already have out there before trying to persuade everyone to encode their data in RDF. That will come over time, when the value of representing information in a structured manner becomes too obvious, when it’d be just silly to do otherwise. Also, I think that service, application, and tool vendors need to see the value in adopting common knowledge representations on the wire. For example, could Facebook export all its data as RDF? Of course they can… they have a graph and they can represent it using any technology they want. Why don’t the use RDF then? Well, there is no benefit (yet) to their business to do so. The data is not commodity; they have a competitive advantage in maintaining that data closed or provide access to it only through their platform, in the way that is easier to them. Over time, this will certainly change, especially given the emergence of data sharing platforms like Open Social.

In general, I have the cynic view that companies are interested in standards and interoperability only when it’s not anymore to their advantage to do otherwise*. I am lucky to be working with people who are supporters of open standards. As technologists, we need to be always demonstrating the potential business opportunities around open, structured data; I am a huge fun!

* This is my personal view of course and should not be taken as my company’s position on standards.

I’m in New York for the LinkedData Planet conference. I am very much looking forward to it. Tim Berners-Lee is amongst the keynote speakers and there are lots of interesting talks.

I am going to participate in the New York Semantic Web Meetup panel in the evening. It should be lots of fun.

It was really great to see and spend time with Paul Watson. He was around to give a presentation at the Google Scalability conference. We took the opportunity to also invite him and talk in Microsoft. As always, Paul’s work at the Newcastle University is state-of-the-art. Great stuff.

Paul and co have even launched InkSpotScience, a company to provide science services on demand. I am really interested in what they are going to deliver.

I’ve known Paul since 1996. He’s been a fantastic mentor, teacher, supervisor, boss, friend! It’s great to spend time with him and listen to his ideas and work.

<half-humorous-half-serious-mood>

A recent interaction with my “Web book” co-authors made me think. When we try to reason about architecture, when we try to come up with the essence of good architectures, good systems design, good practices, we effectively philosophize. We’ve been doing it all these years around REST, the Web, Web Services, state, distributed systems. I wonder whether companies need the role of “Software Philosopher” or “Systems Philosopher” in addition to “Developer”, “Software Architect”, “Tester”, etc.

I believe that an architect is effectively already playing that role to some extent... thinks about, scrutinizes, analysis all aspects of a system/effort. However, a philosopher will have to be more... combining the qualities of an architect, a developer, a tester, a designer, a thinker... someone who understands the technology, understands the customers, understands the solution, visualizes the future and the implication, appreciates the strategy, builds the story, articulates the vision :-)

Then again... it might be all the philosophy books I’ve been reading on knowledge representation lately :-)

.savas. (Software Philosopher :-)

</half-humorous-half-serious-mood>

I spent the last two days at the Seattle Innovation Symposium. What a fascinating event. I was invited to share my observations around innovation in Microsoft. Those who know me and how I feel about some of the things that happen in my company would not have been surprised with my views regarding the lack of flexibility, the slow reaction in many cases, the “play it safe” mentality, the flawed progression and reward structure, etc. It was fun to disagree with my fellow Microsoft employee at the event :-) The Google folks didn’t turn up for the discussion panel, apparently after their PR didn’t allow them to.

It was one of the very few such meetings that I actually paid attention throughout. The people and the structure of the event captured my full attention (which translates to minimum email processing during the presentations and discussions). Many clever people talking about business, executive decisions, corporate culture, innovation, organizational structure. Hmmm… I wonder whether an MBA should be part of my future plans :-)

It was totally worth my time!

Jim and Martin deliver a brilliant performance. Highly recommended.

Whatever the market/product decision, I think it’s pretty cool :-)

My company has loooong way to go if the perception towards its practices is to change. The following quote I think summarizes the opinion of many in the tech community :-(

Indeed, Galbraith said, "As long as Windows/Office dominates Microsoft's balance sheet, these cross-platform Microsoft plays always feel a bit like the story of the boy who upon encountering a rattlesnake picks it up after it promises not to hurt him, upon which the snake promptly bites. After the boy protests, the snake says: 'You knew what I was when you picked me up.' No matter what capabilities Silverlight may have, I think most of us in the community simply wouldn't dream of embracing architectures dependent on Microsoft's goodwill to support other OS vendors." (“Move Over, AJAX, ARAX Is Here”)

I seriously don’t know how to technically challenge that opinion. Obviously we have lots of ground to cover in order to change perceptions. My group is trying its best to demonstrate that we want to work closely with the research, open source, and tech communities. I am a true believer in making people productive no matter what technologies they wish to use. We should give them options and allow them to choose. If they wish to use MacOS X, Linux, Ruby, etc., they should be able to do so and a company like Microsoft should try its best to accommodate their needs. (Disclaimer: That’s my personal view and it does not necessarily reflect my group’s or my company’s opinion even though I’d like to believe that I am not a complete alien :-).

Having Ruby support for Silverlight (or any other dynamic language for that matter) is a good thing since it gives people choice.

It was nice to meet with Mark Little at the Jim Gray tribute few days ago. One of the many things we discussed was the concept of an “architect” in computing. He blogged about it and I find myself agreeing with his views.

I was at Berkeley over the weekend for Jim Gray’s tribute. It was an excellent event. Lots of big names in Computer Science were there to celebrate Jim’s life and career. It is absolutely amazing how many people Jim touched on a personal and professional level. Very moving and fascinating event. I highly recommend the recordings of the presentations.

My interactions with Jim started in 2003, when he sent me a message with just the words “right on!” as a comment to the WS-GAF paper (linked as CS-TR-825). It was what the team needed after all the negative feedback (even “$%@$#” words in private communications) we were receiving at the time. I met Jim at PDC03 and continued to interact with him. He was the reason I took the decision to join Microsoft in 2005 and the main reason I decided to leave CSD and Don Box’s team in order to join Tony Hey in 2006. I was very lucky and honored to officially have him as my mentor within Microsoft. We exchanged lots of messages but, as it was typical of Jim, he made everyone feel special, everyone feel as if they had his full attention and he was the best mentor to a LOT of people.

I just read about goosh on ./. How cool. And how appropriate that it's a shell hosted in a browser. I am sure there are other similar ones all over but the delivery of this particular one is just cool.

(only those who've used a *nix shell will appreciate the beauty of this one :-)

(original story on Slashdot)