Social Glass

The semantic web is often heralded as the next evolution of the internet, Web 3.0. Wikipedia describes the semantic web as an:

evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a format that can be read and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily.

Indeed the semantic web promises to make entities like “address”, “contact info.”, etc. which appear within unstructured text on web pages, to be machine parsable through the use of microformats. Other semantic web standards, such as OWL, aim to define the relationships between objects and attributes within a pre-determined ontology.

Behind the firewall, an intranet marked up according to these standards would be information Garden of Eden with relationships between knowledge and metadata about content items being deeply embedded. The Discovery process on such an intranet would certainly be very rewarding given this abundance of “information about information”.

All of this works if content is published using the structural components the semantic web requires. And herein lies the problem - structure.

Within the context of Enterprise 2.0 we often talk about wikis and blogs being emergent - meaning they adapt to the needs and requirements of the knowledge worker. We want knowledge workers to impose their own structures, perhaps with minimal guidance through the use of patterns like scaffolding.

So how are we going to enforce the use of, say, microformats every time a knowledge worker writes an address or somebody’s contact information? Personally, I can’t think of a way without imposing structure. And I’d hate to see said structure reduce participation.

I believe in the value proposition of the semantic web, but to maintain current emergence capabilities, wiki and blog technology will have to be significantly enhanced to automatically mark up content when published. I think we’re a long way off from that being possible.

A few days ago I got a request from my Managing Director (Partner) asking if I knew of anybody in the Enterprise 2.0 blogosphere who’d like to join our firm as a consultant specializing in Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 in Australia. We have the go-ahead to bring onboard 3 such consultants at varying levels of seniority.

Most of the work we do is strategic in this space, but we’re gaining a lot of momentum, and I’d be surprised if we’re not part of several E2.0 implementations next year.

If you’re interested or know somebody who might be, send me an email at jeremy.thomas at socialglass.com. I’ll respond with more information about the firm and the opportunities at hand.

I remembered reading about Dapper last year when they were profiled on Techcrunch and thought I’d check it out again to build a demo. Dapper provides a web-based wizard tool that exposes data from virtually any website as a service (which they call a “Dapp”). For example, I’ve created a REST interface with Dapper that returns the latest information on fires burning in Victoria (it’s fire season in Australia), which you can see here, by parsing the content from the table on the Country Fire Association’s current fire page. I can now programmatically overlay this data, which includes fire severity, the number of fire trucks on scene, and fire location, on a Google Map without the CFA having to invest in creating API-based services.

And that’s the value of mashup tools like these - companies can exploit their web-based information assets without having to invest heavily in backend systems integration. Contradicting my recent post where I said companies must have a good SOA strategy before deploying enterprise mashups, “Dapper for the Enterprise” could get us a long way toward achieving the mashup dream without such an investment.

I’m feeling more optimistic about this whole enterprise mashup thing now.

Joe McKendrick hit on a great point when he asked “Is Gartner telling us to ‘make sure there are adults in the room’ before launching into Web 2.0 activities?”. Joe goes on to point out that “All the excitement around various aspects of Web 2.0 may truly be a distraction from SOA”. Mashups, or web-based applications that bring together functionality from multiple systems to do something in aggregate that they do not do on their own (think twittervision), require a mature service oriented architecture from which said functionality can be sourced.

We talk so much about widgets and web oriented architectures (the visual aspect of SOA) that we forget about the significant investment that companies must make to deploy enterprise mashups. I touched on this a few weeks ago, but Dion Hinchliffe mentioned that an immature services landscape is a major barrier to mashup adoption. He writes “Mashups are predicated upon the ready preexistence of ready-to-use Web services and network APIs which are ready to be used to build on top of.”

In other words, if I want to create a Customer Search widget I’ll need to have first developed an interface into my customer database of record that, oh yeah, was programmed in Fortran in 1978. That costs money, and in my experience a lot of companies just aren’t there yet.

Shiv Sing makes an interesting point about the Microsoft investment in Facebook, where he says “What does this mean from an enterprise perspective? Quite simply that Facebook can get into the intranet market”. I couldn’t agree more. Susan Scrupski points out that Microsoft is very serious about Web 2.0 with recent deals negotiated with Atlassian and Newsgator to integrate their tools into Sharepoint.

Microsoft’s new association with Facebook will only strengthen its position in the Enterprise 2.0 space - that is if Facebook is actually willing to engage in the enterprise market. If it is, Microsoft, which is already entrenched in most of the Fortune 1000 companies, will be a good conduit through which “Facebook for the Enterprise” can be introduced. I’m going to be keeping my eye on this as it develops. Next year could be very interesting.