Frank Manola (one of the editors of the RDF Primer) sent this humorous story to the RDF Mail List today (quoted here entirely and paragraphed for increased readability):

The entertainment system was belting out the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out” when the phone rang.

When Pete answered, his phone turned the sound down by sending a message to all the local devices that had a volume control. Unfortunately, this also included the phone’s volume control, the manufacturer not having been sufficiently precise in specifying its rules, so Pete thought there wasn’t anyone on the line. After this performance was repeated several times, Pete finally figured out what was going on, and adjusted the phone volume control manually. “Why can’t they tighten up those rules?,” he muttered to himself.

His sister, Lucy, was on the line from the doctor’s office: “Mom needs to see a specialist and then has to have a series of physical therapy sessions. Bi-weekly or something. I’m going to have my agent set up the appointments.” Pete immediately agreed to share the chauffeuring.

At the doctor’s office, Lucy instructed her Semantic Web agent through her hand-held Web browser. The agent promptly tried to retrieve information about Mom’s prescribed treatment from the doctor’s agent, but was placed on hold several times. When the agent finally got through, it reported that the doctor’s agent had recorded the wrong treatment, having misread the doctor’s handwriting.

After getting that straightened out with the doctor’s secretary (and making arrangements to have an unnecessary lower body cast removed from Mom), Lucy re-instructed her agent, which looked up several lists of providers, and checked for the ones in-plan for Mom’s insurance within a 20-mile radius of her home and with a rating of excellent or very good on trusted rating services.

It then began trying to find a match between available appointment times (supplied by the agents of individual providers through their Web sites) and Pete’s and Lucy’s busy schedules. (The emphasized keywords indicate terms whose semantics, or meaning, were defined for the agent through the Semantic Web.)

In a few minutes the agent presented them with a plan. Pete didn’t like it—-University Hospital was all the way across town from Mom’s place, and he’d be driving back in the middle of rush hour. Besides, the list of providers was out of date, because the insurance company hadn’t updated its Web site in over a year. “S__t!,” he exclaimed.

Plowing ahead anyway, he set his own agent to redo the search with stricter preferences about location and time. Before it could begin this task, however, the agent had to pause for 3 hours to download and install the latest security patches for Microsoft Agent.

After completing this process, and installing upgrades to several other components to fix compatibility problems, Pete’s agent began the search. Lucy’s agent, having complete trust in Pete’s agent in the context of the present task, tried to automatically assist by supplying access certificates and shortcuts to the data it had already sorted through. However, due to the new security patches, Pete’s agent no longer trusted Lucy’s agent, and rejected all this information.

After an hour spent resolving that, the new plan was presented: a much closer clinic and earlier times—-but there were two warning notes. First, Pete would have to reschedule a couple of his less important appointments. He checked what they were—-not a problem.

The other was something about the insurance company’s list failing to include this provider under physical therapists: “Service type and insurance plan status securely verified by other means,” the agent reassured him. “(Details?)” Lucy registered her assent at about the same moment Pete was muttering, “Spare me the details,” and it was all set.

(Of course, Pete couldn’t resist the details, and later during a break had his agent explain how it had found that provider even though it wasn’’t on the proper list. Unfortunately, the details showed that the reason the provider wasn’t on the proper list was that the provider was a promoter of unusual sporting events, and the agent had scheduled Mom for entry in a biweekly extreme kickboxing tournament, all this due to overly-general ontology definitions for provider and physical therapy. The agent had also debited Pete’s debit card for the $500 entry fee. “Rats!,” he exclaimed. “Why don’t they tighten up those ontologies,” he muttered to himself).

At the end of a long day, Pete came home to find that his voice-activated, pro-active agent, not being able to distinguish speech acts very well, had had two truck-loads of horse manure delivered to his front yard (the agent having determined through the Semantic Web that s__t and horse manure could be considered equivalent terms in the context of the present task), and a container of rats delivered to his back door.

“What a goatf__k!,” he screamed, then “No, no, I didn’t mean it!,” as his agent simultaneously began looking up sources of goats, and delivering warnings on the dangers of sexually-transmitted diseases. Unfortunately, due to the aforementioned problem with speech acts…

[With grateful acknowledgement to “The Semantic Web”, Scientific American, May 2001, Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila]

In a very geeky way, the above story is very funny, but it shows a few very interesting points.

But let’s face it: is the above scenario really different from what we have today? I mean, look at people using a computer, a cell phone, an ATM: there are systems that are ‘usable’ (which, down to earth means, “copes well with mistakes and diversity of use and unexpected scenarios”) and some that are not. I’ve seen web sites that are usable and some that are just a nightmare, yet the www is more ‘useful’ as an information system than anything before.

If we believe that a better data model is going to make better usability on its own, we are doomed to failure, but can the concept, mixed with the existing architecture, create an even more useful information system than we have today?

Well, for one thing, I can’t see how it can make it worse.

Anyway, the semantic web has nothing to do with artificial intelligence if not the name and if the systems built on top of it will be good or bad, useful or idiotic, is simply a different concern.

To celebrate Firefox’s release, we released the first beta version of Welkin, a general purpose graphical and interactive RDF browser.

For those who follow my work, they will see this as “agora for RDF” and, in fact, it it

Enjoy!

we got slashdotted! (boy, average joe slashdot reader is really clueless, oh well) Analysis on the slashdot effect on the server load coming soon!

I have a t-shirt that Paul gave me from the mozilla party that was held in 1998 when Mozilla was first released as open source. It took more than 6 years to get here. Sure, lots of released of that huge beast that is the Mozilla Suite, but Firefox 1.0 is what I (and many others) have been waiting for since Microsoft decided to crush Netscape with all possible means.

Why is this so important? Here is why:

• Firefox is compliant to the W3C recommendations and, if not, everybody will consider it a bug and you can expect it to be fixed.
• Firefox is free software. Not just “free as in beer”, but “free as in speech”. The Mozilla Suite was “open source”, FireFox is “free software”. Why? because no stinking AOL is now dictating that you keep all that crap in a single package.
• Firefox is innovative. Yeah, I’m talking to those idiots that believe that just because you don’t get paid for it directly you can’t create innovation.Now, it’s in their faces. Tabbed browsing, popup blocking, built-in search bar, in-page keyword highlighting, bookmarklets… try to find those in IE!
• Firefox is a good citizen of the web. Why? because it works for you, not for the corporation behind it. IE introduced pop-up blocking, but then the folks at MSN got pissed and they had to lower the effectiveness a little, so that Microsoft could earn money on those popups.
• Firefox is good software. The mozilla folks spent years building the infrastructure around the code. Bugzilla, tinderbox, bonsai, are all tools that are used to keep the software solid as things move along.
• Firefox is going to be there tomorrow. Yeah, unlike IE that you never know what’s going to happen to your webapps if you connect to their features.
• Firefox is not built into your OS! Which means not only, it doesn’t infect your computer with crap or makes it crash if it crashes, but also it allows you to have as many different versions of that browser as you want installed at the same time! Ask those people that had software update install a new version of IE every night and have their webapp broken the next morning!

Should I keep going?

And there is one more feature that might pass unnoticed to many but that I think it’s revolutionary: the built-in hook to the CreativeCommons search engine.

Why that? well, Creative Commons is, at the end, an RDF ontology and a query returns the metadata semantics associated to it. Here is an example.

This is the first semantic-web search engine. It’s ranking is poor, admittedly but it’s based on Nutch, an open source search engine written by the same guy that brought you Apache Lucene, so you can expect it to get better.

Now there is no excuse people: let’s take the web back! it belongs to the people of this planet, not to Microsoft!