Is Semantic Web another buzz-word?

Is "Semantic Web" just another buzz-word? Well, maybe not... Let me take you back to late 90's for a second.

The first era, the World Wide Web - or Web 1.0 - connecting information, making sure that users were connected to access the information.

Time that marketers had no idea how to market a product on a computer screen; the time that start-ups would come up with a very simple idea, fund it and sell it. B2B, eBay, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Netscape... (if you have never heard of Netscape, please don't call me old.)

But that was also the time that we all learned how not to jump on the band wagon. We became smarter and cautious about every new word in the industry. Specially the financial space, very conservative when it comes to new trends. Not to blame, there's a lot of money involved to risk, also, products usually need to go to market in a couple of quarters, not enough time to learn, conceptualize, design, develop and test.

We are now during the final stages of Web 2.0, connecting people through blogs, social networks, social bookmarking, mash-ups, instant messaging from mobile phone to the web. User interfaces have gotten intelligent using Ajax requests without refreshing the entire web page; news/blog information now comes to you wherever you are, via RSS, based on a custom query. People collaborates through Wiki to insure content is up-to-date and trustworthy. Consumer feeding consumer, can we call it "C2C"?

Now everyone is talking about Semantic Web, Why? Semantic Web is what we all want the Internet to be and do for a long time!

The Semantic Web, the Web 3.0, connecting knowledge, giving meaning to logic. New ways to look data, the use of ontology to increase knowledge connectivity and reasoning.

The Web 3.0 is a timely and natural evolution for the Web, it has been expected for awhile and now that content, companies, technology and consumers are on the same level of connectivity we can move on to the next phase: develop smart agents to deliver useful information back and forth.

Tim Berners-Lee is very optimistic about Semantic Web and feels that this is the time:

"In an hour long interview posted today about the Semantic Web, W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee says all the pieces are in place to move full steam ahead and realize the potential of a world of structured, machine readable data."

Listen to the interview here: http://tinyurl.com/2k494w

The whole notion of semantic technology is to represent meaning and knowledge about the content being displayed or requested. In order to achieve this level of knowledge, there needs to be a form that both people and machines can have the same reasoning. This form is most likely to be in a metadata format.

This new stage of the Web will introduce designers and information architects to a new way of thinking when creating an user interface. We will now have to take into consideration a broad range of knowledge representation and reasoning capabilities including pattern detection, deep linguistics and ontology, welcome to the Semantic User Experience!

If User Experience is the sum of interactions and overall satisfaction an end-user has when using a product, Semantic User Experience will be the intelligence and context-awareness features that will allow the UI to be more adaptive, dynamic, proactive, immersive and the resulting experience easier, useful and enjoyable.

Semantic User Experience will exploit higher bandwidth content, context sensitivity, rich visualization and interaction in the UI.

The bottom line is... As designers, we will have more canvas and colors! This is an exciting time to be a designer.

Next month I will be attending the 2008 Semantic Technology Conference http://www.semantic-conference.com/ and will be posting my findings here.

Cheers!

Using Blogs to write Specs?

I was having diner at Harvard Sq. with a couple of friends from Endeca, talking about user experience in general and its challenges, when occurred to me that Blogs would be a great medium for writing specification documents. What of an epiphany! Real people posting comments about a spec document, or should I call it "specBlog"?

Who actually reads specs... thoroughly?
The truth about spec documents is that you spend a lot of time writing, creating mockups, thinking through every step an end-user may take, to end up with a 40+ pages document that nobody reads - thoroughly. No targeted comments are ever made, people tend to browse the pages and only make a comment when they have a question about a mockup or two.

Targeted sections
Using blogs to write business specs or functional requirements would provide everyone the opportunity to dissect a large document into smaller sections or chapters, which could be released faster (a section every other day) and get immediate comment from your team.

Another good aspect I see about using blogs as medium is that you can actually split the arduous task of writing the entire document by yourself. You could assign sections to different people.

Better distribution
By using blogs, the intended "readers" can actually subscribe to the blog and receive an alert, e-mail or event via a feed reader. I would think that the reader would be more inclined to read a smaller section and make a quality and targeted comments immediately.

Based on quick and faster comments, the author of the section, can actually refine the post and engage a conversation among everyone.

Tagging the specBlog
Let's assume that the name of my blog is "ACME Specs" and inside my blog, we have many posts about different products. Each time I write a post about a particular section for a single product, I could use tags to categorize my post and link it to other related posts.

Now, here's a cool scenario, a post could be used in different products, in other words, if I have a global widget, such as an "AutoComplete Input Field" that is used throughout all my company's products, the very same post can be referenced in future specs by simply tagging your post with the same keywords used in the previously written post.

Wrapping up
If your boss is really anal-retentive about having full documentation - just for the sake of having it - you could simply copy the sections from your blog and package it into your old and beautiful Word template.

I would love to get comments about this idea and will be trying out myself on the next opportunity I have and share it with you.