At the Online News Associated 2009 Conference, I was on a panel to discuss semantic web technologies and social media. This was the talk that I gave.

1. Journalism and the Semantic Web

2. XML Industry Analyst Managing Editor, XMLToday.org O'Reilly Media Contributing Editor [email_address] Twitter: @kurt_cagle Kurt Cagle

3. The role of journalist has always been evolving – it is only the hubris of the established generation that has remained constant. Is Journalism Dead? No.

5. Increasingly less important is their role as reporters.

6. However, their role as raconteur – the ability to create a meaningful (and entertaining) narrative on a set of related events – is crucial .

7. Finally, their authority rests on their authenticity, their veracity, and their insight.

9. The analyst creates sets of assertions that, when compiled, dereferenced and validated, builds a narrative

10. Welcome to Programming!!

12. Informally, semantics touches on the nature of objects, classes and classification.

13. Finally, computational semantics is tied into the notion of abstraction, of creating simpler models that embody the relevant aspects of the larger system.

17. Resources have resource keys or addresses which uniquely define each resource (for some arbitrary definition of uniqueness).

18. A collection is a set of resources.

19. Collections play a huge part in the Semantic Web.

21. A taxonomy , or classification schema, is a set of terms, sometimes with an underlying relationship between these terms.

22. Any resource can be thought of belonging to one or more collections named by a two part moniker - category:term.

23. Classification is “ difficulty:hard” .

24. Digital Orienteering The map is not the territory. Korsybski, 1946 On the web, the map IS the territory. Cagle, 2009

26. Hyperlinks are assertions of relationships.

28. A collection of resource links (a feed)

29. A collection of collections (portals)

31. Syndication formats (RSS, Atom, json) are feed formats

32. HTML structures, such as tables or HTML lists, with one or more links per entry, are also feeds

33. Apps like Drupal are fundamentally resource feed providers and consumers.

35. Most web links point to either resources, feeds, or portals.

36. Implication: web navigation IS categorization – categories provide the navigational structure of the web.

37. Look at Drupal for a good example of this.

39. Web Search is also a form of query – it uses an algorithm (and dynamic parameters to return a feed).

40. Relevance is the degree to which each resource satisfies this query algorithm.

41. At this point in time, the most relevant aspect of Semantics is search.

43. The Long Tail (Chris Anderson) has become a fractal forest of short tails

44. Each microcategory is a micro-market with a limited market size.

45. This is the essence of power laws.

46. Relevance and Audience Size Aut = Total Audience for a given media piece N = Index of categorization partitition Rel(n) = Relevance of nth partition MktSz(n) = Size of market in each partition

47. In English Your total readership for any given piece of media is proportional to how relevant it is for the broadest number of micromarkets.* * One caveat – as size grows, relevance drop

50. Semantic Web Tech can increase machine relevance, but can destroy human relevance.

52. Search, Query and Feeds

53. Widgets

54. Microformats & RDFa

55. Document Enrichment

56. XML Tools (Xquery!)

57. XML Ontologies

58. RDF and OWL, SPARQL, GRDDL

59. Semantic Rules Architectures Increasing Power and Increasing Complexity

61. Widgets create visual semantics – associate “media” with content

62. Widgets represent the componentization of the web, separating content from presentation

64. Microformats use fixed ontologies (vCard, Dublin Core, geoformats) ... fading

65. Document Enrichment

66. RDFa (Resource Description Frameworks for Attributes)

68. These categories are embedded as XML elements or attributes.

69. It uses semantic tools to disambiguate terms.

70. Good starting point: OpenCalais.com (Reuters)

72. XQuery is relatively new (2007) standard for query of XML data stores.

73. XQuery provides distributed queries, development of template outputs, and a full

75. RDFa can be hand entered, or can be added via document enrichment.

76. GRDDL can then read RDFa enriched documents and generate RDF.

77. RDFa/GRDDL represents the bridge between text indexing and the Semantic Web

79. Query Modeler: SQL

81. Query Modeler: XQuery

82. Distributed, Flexible, but still Bounded

84. Query Modeler: SPARQL

87. This principle is known as Linked Data .

88. RDF provides links (or acts as payloads) to resources and can also abstract resource content.

89. Linked Data is distributed – silos disappear.

91. Each pipe in the pipeline is a specific type of XML operation, from counting nodes to performing xqueries

92. SPARQL queries could be used to extract RDF from distributed Linked Data repositories as a pipe.

93. This would unify SPARQL and XQuery, making both semantic and syntactic queries possible.

95. More effective user agents and avatars

96. Automated production of intelligent abstracts

97. Semantic rules can launch nuanced applications based upon meaning matching

98. Semantic rules engines + inferential analysis = sophisticated composition engines

99. Pulitzer Prize by an A.I. by 2030?