Below a post with the presentation and some useful links of a lecture I gave at NHL university on March 31st 2010. Enjoy it

Presentation (links below)

iPad will change computers forever for normal people. Simple computers where web access is even more important. So web apps are the future.

The slides of the companies was about defining their core business and their interest in the web. Adobe: selling design software, Google: collecting data for relevant adds (wants everybody with webaccess to google products), Apple: selling hardware (best software experience), Microsoft: Selling windows, thats why IE9 will not be available for XP and why they now want HTML5 to succeed.

Flash

Adobe isn’t in the Flash business

Seriously.

It isn’t in the Photoshop business, or the Acrobat business, or the [take-your-pick product name] business, either.

It’s in the helping people communicate business.

• Adobe is not in the flash business – On an adobe weblog

HTML5

All examples are best seen in Safari 4+ or a recent Google Chrome release. Want to know how it works.

Use Web inspector in webkit to inspect the elements and to see their CSS. Read more about incredible webkit inspector here and here.

What can I use now:

A simple matrix of what HTML5 features are implemented by which browser.

CSS fonts:

• Font-face generator for all browsers incl free fonts to use.
• Font face more deeply explained
• More Fonts for font-face css.

HTML5 video:

• Cool video player – Also uses webfonts.
• It is all about h264 which flash and html 5 video both support. Vimeo and youtube both have HTML5 video players in beta which are almost identical to flash version. Test youtube HTML5
• Internet Explorer 9 is going to support HTML5 H264 video. Firefox does support the tag but nog H264. But does support the inferior Ogg Vorbis format.

Canvas:

• Cool interactive music visualisation – Also uses HTML5 audio tag for native browser audio.
• Drawing in the browser – almost like photoshop and can even save images thanks to base64.

CSS animations/transitions/transforms

• Snow stack – Navigating through images in 2.5d. Space for enlarging.
• CSS animation – Webkit introduction, also in near future Firefox. Be sure to click through to demos.
• CSS transitions – Webkit and will also be included in firefox. All based on Apple Core Animation.
• CSS 3D transforms – See examples. This was the one I showed in the talk.
• SVG vector animation – You can create vectors in any vector program.

Local Storage:

• Webkit example – Be sure to check web inspector to check results in db viewer.
• Webkit Introduction post
• More client side storage. Localstorage also works in IE8+.

IE9:

• HTML5, hardware accelerated drawing & SVG
• Script speed compared to other browsers – I used the graph from here.

Webgl: (only works in experimental browser versions of firefox & webkit)

• Quake 2 with GWT & webgl in browser
• Webkit webgl introduction – The latest webkit build has changed too much to show all the demos correctly.
• Characters be sure to try out multiple & animated characters with right number select.
• Chrome windows directX translation for webGL coming.

Websockets:

• Websockets in Chrome

Google Web toolkit: write cool fast web apps in Java. Compiles to super optimized javascript. Google Wave is a GWT product and even Quake 2 can be built in it. (See webgl)

• Overview
• 2.0 new features with video
• Building UI like Adobe Flex in XML
• App engine for superscalable cheap NOSQL databases

Our Care product: (screenshots are from an older version than I demoed)

• Lable EZLP

Photo by Raymond van Dongelen

Google has done it! They have made the biggest problem in the world a bit smaller! Communication. With Wave.

The communication problem

The biggest problem of humanity now is communication. With communication we become aware of knowledge, problems and can combine ideas to solve anything. With better communication better matches of people can be made and better ideas can come to fruition.

If you look inside any medium to large sized company or government agency you see structures of departments. Each have their own task and the chain of command connects them to keep them on the road. Over the years they all had different means of communication and these days almost all depend entirely on E-mail…

E-mail is the glue that keeps our society standing.

E-mail is locked in to each workers own mailbox and you communicate by sending a text to one others mailbox. E-mails are fragments of the discussion and it is very difficult to see the discussion as a whole. It is not easy to stitch the fragments together.

There are many 2.0 tools to fix the problems of e-mail. But none are really mainstream as e-mail itself. The 2.0 tools now seemed to be experiments awaiting to be picked for their parts to combine into something new.

The best text edit ideas combined.

Google looked at any tool for text based communication and took the best parts to combine it in one tool.

• They began to look at E-mail message and reply model. They picked the interface so people could quickly see what the new messages are and could quickly reply.
• They centralized the whole communication process like any 2.0 tool so discussions could easily be shared between people.
• They took the search capabilities of the google search engine so anything could be easily found.
• They took the instant way of communicating from instant messaging. Replies are added instantaniously.
• They took the real time appearing text from google docs and its collaborative writing.
• They took the inclusion of people in discussions from chat rooms.
• They took the tags/labels from gmail and social bookmarking sites like delicious to organize your waves..
• They took the history function from wikipedia, svn/cvs and google docs and even evolved it by opening it up with an instant slider.
• They took the linking to other texts(waves) from wikipedia and html so you can create a network of texts and overviews.
• They took the bots from IRC and evolved them into robots that listen in on the text to give instant reactions or text transformations. They can also post any text to another text medium. (expect tie-ins to create archaic e-mail, word docs, blog posts, social networks (facebook wall), twitters, wiki articles, forum threads, sms messages and anything text)
• They took the external widget model from google maps so a wave can be included into anything.
• They took the internal widget model from open social so you can include widgets into waves for games, polls, task lists, spreadsheets, presentations, anything…
• They took the protocol model form e-mail. Anybody can start a wave server and communicate with other wave servers. Discussions internal to one wave server will never leave to wave servers of others. It is an open standard. Anybody can create own servers and clients.

There is much more. The first implementation is a full HTML 5 web app with drag and drop support for the waves themselves and images with instant uploaders. The first robots include instant google maps tie ins, instant translation (wow) and very advanced natural language spell checkers.

Wave: The future of collaborative text

Wave is set to be the social glue of anything text. It is set up to combine the very best collaborative text ideas to create the e-mail replacement for the next century. It is here to solve many communication problems. Everybody can easily include it in any current 2.0 tool to create the ultimate inbox. Are you leaving a message/comment anywhere? And want to track it with probable reactions down? Expect it in your wave in-box.

Missing the focus: a Wave Tsunami

Wave is great to centralize any text discussion to one in-box. With the google instant search and tags you can find many stuff easily.

But you will be drowned quickly in waves when any text based communications from any site is centralized into one in-box. A true wave Tsunami. I don’t want all my messages in one in-box with only a search function. The in-box is a metaphor created for easy transition from e-mail but is not the right way to organize your waves. It is like the first car: a horse cart without horses.

In this time of information overload our main problem is focus. We need to filter the waves on context. Filter them for example on work for project A or own interests on hobby B or social life on sporting group b. We need tree maps (work>projectA) to navigate our contexts to see our contacts quickly. We need tag clouds, social diagrams, wave source maps. We need next gen wave organization tools.

The tags are already there to make this possible. But who is going to build the next gen wave client to create this focus?

Wavesurfer? Surfboard? Baywatch? oscillator/oscilloscope? Frequencies? Many names are possible for such an app

With such client based on personal context a true semantic web will become possible.

Everything about the Wave.

We need energy & oil for mobility and our growing numbers of gadgets. The previous post gave an impression of the current energy system powering our society: The energy system is mainly based on fossil fuels coordinated by powerful central companies and governments. It leaves behind unwanted side products like greenhouse gasses or radioactive waste and is in limited supply.

Storage and transportation of energy is also a problem. A lot of it is lost just by transporting it over large powergrids. We also need to constantly generate new energy while adapting it to the needs of the people or else the system collapses. Batteries like in our gadgets as powersources for unregular powerdemand are not practicle on the larger scale.

Hydrogen

Luckily change is nearby because a very well known gas finally becomes save enough to use as an energy storage medium.  This new medium is hydrogen (H2). Hydrogen can be generated by running an electric current through water (H2O) so it is seperated in Oxygen (O2) and Hydrogen (H2). Hydrogen can be stored in gaseous form which by burning can be returned to H2O. No carbon (C) atoms are present so no CO2, the main greenhouse gas, is formed. The energy stored in this form makes it usable for transportation, heating and as a fuel for cars.

We can now store and transport energy savely. No longer are we dependent on the limited supply of millions of years old oil.

Sunshine

But hydrogen is only the transport medium. There would be no change if we kept using fossil fuels to generate the energy to store inside the H2. Luckily sustainable sources are developed throughout the years but none had really gone mainstream.

But one powersource is really nearby to retake its central role. It is already responsible for the energy of all life by feeding the plants which are eaten by animals. And over centuries the remains of the plants and animals create oil and gas with pressure below the surface. But can we also use the sun for our own energy needs as it shines everywhere on the planet. In a half hour enough sunlight reaches the earth to power the entire world for a year!!!

In the past we tried with solarcells but they just were not sufficient. It took 20 years of use to get back its value at purchase. But now solar technology evolves very fast.  Solarcells can repay their creation costs in a few years and still function for decades of energy. With some recent crossover discoveries from the plasma TV sector they can be more easily massproduced. Calculations show that with modern solar cells placed within a part of the sahara we could power the complete planet.

A whole new solar revolution is near and some say it is going to be bigger than the computer revolution.

Power to the People

At the moment everything is centralized by a few powerful institutions and governments.

With sun everybody with a roof can produce energy and distribute it to all neighbours. But also wind and sea/wave power are rapidly evolving as viable choices for poor sunshine locations. And with hydrogen as a way to store the power we have a whole new system.

No big company that runs with money/value of millions of years of nature, no government is needed to tax energy, no polution is generated, everything is simpler and better.

The power is of the people. The power balance will change.

More reading material (sources)

• Wikipedia EN – hydrogen economy
• Tegenlicht: Here comes the sun (Dutch but with english links on the right)
• Tegenlicht: Waterstofrevolutie (Dutch)
•  Apple patent: Solar cells in the screens of gadgets.

Creative Commons photo of Mr Sun and Mini sun by Warm ‘n Fuzzy 

Our whole society would collapse without electric power. We completely rely on our computers, phones, refrigerators, TV, lamps. It has changed our way of living completely. And it is strange to realise it only became mainstream since the mid 20th century…

Growing numbers of power-gadgets

Since the 50s waves and waves of new must-have gadgets began to flood the market. What began as an electric system for simple lamps now powers almost everything in our home. With the coming of the global net, more and more stuff gets chips and ‘needs’ to become intelligent. We ‘need’ our media consoles, smartphones, intelligent cars, plasma TVs, LED lights etc. But now it seems an age of convergence of devices is happening with as prime examples the iPhone, the coming of the online cloud as our information store and the rise of netbooks together with more and more efficient chips.

But the cloud data centers to save our virtual lives already take more energy than all air traffic together. To sustain one Second Life avatar it consumes as much power as one Brazilian in a year. Now add up every social account you have. Maybe you should cancel some…

Constant flow of power

Power reaches us in 2 ways: electrons from a power outlet and gas for mostly heating and cooking. Electric power can be generated from multiple sources and gas comes from huge gasfields formed through the ages below the earths surface from organic remains.

Most electric power these days is generated from coal and natural gas and in some countries from nuclear reactions. It is impractical to store power after production in batteries like in our small gadgets so it needs to be constantly generated. So power companies need to constantly anticipate demand and adjust their generators. On hot airco days and during business hours more is needed. Also a lot of power is used just by empowering all those power networks transporting it.

If one node in the power network fails the whole network can come down because the pressure (voltage) drops. This can cause the power-failures which has happened before in Europe and the USA/Canada.

Powerful companies

Now power comes from a few powerful companies/countries mostly from sources like coal, gas, plutonium or petroleum/oil.  With a growing world population and thus demand these energy sources are depleting. The prices will rise together with the power of influence of the companies and countries behind the energy sources.

Most of the conversions to power have unwanted side-products like CO2 or nuclear waste. These products will stay in our climate for years to centuries. With the deforesting smaller and smaller amounts of CO2 are converted back to Oxygen (O2) and organic carbon  building blocks (C) for the plants. The planet takes a huge hit by our growing energy demands.

Challenges

We need our power for our current way of life. This information age is here to stay. But our current power system is reaching its max. It uses finite sources from centralized powerful companies and countries. We need to use more sustainable ways of generating power. Luckily they are just around the corner!

Read on about the bright future of power: Power everywhere 2.0

Creative Commons photo of power outlet by splorp

House generally refers to a shelter or building that is a dwelling or place for habitation by human beings. The term includes many kinds of dwellings ranging from rudimentary huts of nomadic tribes to high-rise apartment buildings. The social unit that lives in a house is known as a household. Most commonly, a household is a family unit of some kind, though households can be other social groups, such as single persons, or groups of unrelated individuals. 

Wikipedia EN

We begin our lives at our parents where we share most rooms and have most of the times our own bedroom. As we grow up we tend to rent a room inside some student appartments and scale up along the way to our own house or apartment. At the end of our lives some choose to live in an elderly home, with their children or in their dream house somewhere gone in a nice climate. We are in a constant flow of moving to a new place which is adapted to our needs. This was not always so, a few centuries ago it was normal for many people to pass a house to each new generation of siblings.

Bigger & bigger, quicker

The house became the ultimate status symbol. The larger and the more beautiful, the better. It shows your wealth and also your style.

With the changing needs of people whole neighbourhoods of old buildings need to be demolished or renovated and whole new neighbourhoods need to be built. We live in cities which are constantly changing. Whole neighbourhoods can now be built within a few years. Many homes are built in the same style out of prefab parts. As this industry matured the more rules where formed and the more uniform our homes became. On the maps of our cities the new neighborhoods tend to be the most boring by their regular spacious patterns.

Cocooning

As times progressed technology has created our home as a place where we can do everything: cook, wash, watch, socialize, sleep, work, entertain etc. In earlier days we needed to go out to wash our clothes, watch our movies, play our games and talk to people. Everything is at our home now and people tend to cocoon.  More and more people are alienated from their direct surroundings and only know their own home, workplace, friends places and pub/restaurant in the city. It is not surprising more and more people tend to become conservative and fear anything different even in their own neighbourhood. Gone are the small communities where people kept an eye on each other.

Over the years we also more and more alienate from our elderly. They tend to get lonely in elderly home as their children concentrate more on their own lives. We have huge problems the coming years with the babyboomers becoming a grey wave. Multiple countries can’t pay anymore for this flood of need for healthcare. Were are the times where gramps lived with the family? The same can be said for our criminals with their faulthy social environment and other social outcasts like tramps.

Object of our savings

More and more people tend to buy homes. Houses are expensive and society has made up a nice system of making you able to do so by closing a mortgage. The bank lends you some value many times bigger than you earn and in return they keep the interest on your home. 

You get the home because you promise to pay that interest. Houses are essentially built by future money you are worth to earn. And since a growing number of people does this, better and more expensive houses can be built from this future money. Most of the times people never pay for the real value of the house. This value system seems like one big bubble.

And recently this went haywire with banks giving loans to people who couldn’t afford the interest on the homes. While interest was low on the beginning and the people thought they could afford their new home it was unpayable later on. The banks used this mortgage to sell it to other banks for profits because the buying bank thought it was worth lots of future interest money…

Challenges

We are on a road of alienation of our direct surroundings and on our way to the ultimate cocoon that needs to sustain your own families needs. Having your own palace payed out of a strange system of promising future interest money can’t be sustained. I think we need to rethink our cities and form more shared resources. Then we need much less so they can be built much more diverse. We need to go back a step and be more social, better for our elderly and keep a better eye on our social outcasts. This can’t be sustained indefinitely.

Creative Commons photo of the houses in Ypenburg, The Hague Holland by Michplay

We are all a puzzle piece of a larger whole. A whole that keeps us alive and takes care of us as long as we contribute to it. It adapts to good and bad times as a completely dynamic system. This dynamic system is called society.

A society is a population of humans characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals that share a distinctive culture and/or institutions. More broadly, a society is an economic, social and industrial infrastructure, in which a varied multitude of people are a part of. 

Wikipedia EN

Our society has formed throughout the centuries. With new technologies we can abstract our lives further from simple food-gatherers to a compartmentalized group where everybody contributes to one piece of keeping us alive as a whole. We can live closer together and abstract our food, water, waste and energy production. We can now because of this group effort build huge buildings and go to the moon. What’s next?

The inner workings of this holistic system has kept me fascinated for the past few years. As society grows more complex we begin to loose grip on it. Nobody can have a complete view anymore now it is a global interconnected system. 

Mapping the pieces

But what are all the puzzle pieces? And what are the challenges for each piece? Maybe we can understand better what is happening around us.

In the coming time I want to make a journey through each part that keeps our society standing. I will begin with our direct environment: our homes and all we need to keep alive there like walls, power, water, gas, waste management, furniture etc.
Along the way I want to look at the whole system behind each part like energy, transportation, communication or healthcare and try to find the whole industry that is needed to bring a person this good. I always want to end each post with the coming challenges for that piece of society.

Along the way we will try to find a larger picture. What are the main challenges for the next centuries? What will new influences like a global networked internet do to our society in the long run? To what kind of society will we grow to? I think this awareness is the key to form something better and more stable than we are living in now.

Yes, this blogpost is longer than normal but I wanted to create one holistic view. If you are not a big reader just scan the nice bits or go to the end

The Lift

The past week I was in Geneva, the city where HTTP/HTML or in other words the internet was invented. I visited Lift 08, a three day event to explore the social impact of new technologies. Together with Martin Kuipers I just let everything around me flood into my brain.

Lift 07 was a special event for us. Although I was not there, Martin’s enthusiasm triggered a whole process towards Lable. The ideas he brought back gave us the tools to finally knit together some thoughts of the past years. I had to go and see this Lift where foresighters came together.

Lift 08

This year was a 3 day event with 700 visitors from all over the world. The first day was full of community driven workshops at Geneva University with a Venture Night at the end. The second two days where full with talks on different subjects. Both days had also nice closures in the form of a cheese fondue and a nice party in the center of town.

There were many interesting people and I felt great having met some. Although looking around the conference room I felt many were addicted to being connected.

I chose to only open a dummy book and set myself in information absorb mode and tried to see a larger pattern. With everything around me you could smell the future, you just needed to look below the surface.

Online Environments

A big topic which was present in almost all talks where the online environments that are part of the latest technological hype. What are the implications of these environments and how could you make them succeed? How you could use them to teach people, and how to use them to change them?

We got for example an insight into the South Korean world of Cyworld. On how Koreans organized themselves online and how they depend on their mobile phone. Attention was the main currency and self branding the key. How almost-sync was the latest development towards real time intimacy. How Twitter was the western equivalent. South Korea is just miles ahead of these social communities. 98% of the 20s are on CyWorld.

The most interesting talk on this subject was by Pierre Belanger, owner of SkyRock. Although SkyRock is just another social network he described a future of social messengers. Where the social network became the new digital id of the future. He described a netamorphosis towards a net not centered around bandwidth but around code. A net that is not centered around one site but a multiform platform that could run on phones, instant messengers etc. E-mail is dead.

I immediately connected it to some other movements of people talking about Jabber as the next http. And he basically described the new backbone of the internet as a Social Operating System. Everything will center on chat. Two-way instead of one-way communication.

Connecting tech with people

There were also great talks about open social by Kevin Marks of Google and Grid Computing by François Grey of CERN. They both have methods of connecting the people and computers with information.

Open social is the glue for anything social centering around people/friends, activities and events and seems to also be the glue for the next generation of people.

The grid computing talk had some great insights on how to use people and their computers for science. How normal people became an important part by letting them be involved. This by being transparant and fun. A whole @home platform was born out of it that has much bigger cimputing power than any supercomputer in the world.

In everything you could feel online environments are on the verge of change. The current form is just a carriage without horses and we still need to evolve to the definite form.

Mobile phones

Most people in developing countries don’t have computers but they do have mobile phones. They share them, they connect with them. In China for example there are 4 people born per second, but 20 new subscribers of mobile providers per second.

The mobile is the most important connected device and it was interesting how Younghee Jung went out to those countries to let the people design the best mobile phone for themselves. It was very interesting to see the specific specific solutions for problems they live with. Like multi-simcard support, multiple address books, heart shaped phones, ultimate everything phone etc.

We also heard some insights on the future of the phone. How it would evolve to a simpler gateway to the world and that the phone contained the answer to future payment. How the iphone revolutionizes and by someone of Nokia how the iPhone is not the ultimate answer.

User Experience & Stories

A lot of talk was also about what story the technology is telling and the user relates towards it. The perception of a user completely relies on the story as they create context.

The most interesting was by Rafi Haladjian, one of the inventors of the wifi Rabbit Nabaztag. He told about setting up a platform called Violet built with ambient technology. A plarform with which you are informed non intrusively.

Why the rabbit:

If you can connect a rabbit you can connect anything.

He showed some great stuff like a future product of RFID stamps that a rabbit(or some other object) can sniff and after the object will react with something relevant. He saw only 2 or 3 objects connected to the rest of the world and saw a future we will connect the rest of the stuff in our homes.

It was also nice to have visited the discussion on the failures of ubiquitous computing the previous day. It seems that we are on the verge of creating smart houses, we only should make them start out dumb and grow their smartness for a more satisfying experience. It is all about making a growing emotional connection by growing an evolving story.

New ways of working

The Zentrale Intelligenze Agentur was a wow presentation for me and Martin. They described the way of working we as Lable were philosophizing about for the last year. I really feel that we are on the beginning of a new hierarchy less way of working. That people begin to see that hierarchy kills passion and creative/innovation efficiency. And now we were confirmed it is a global feeling.

Games are fun.

The game track was really fun. You should just see the entertaining Paul Barnett video if you have the time. He describes we shouldn’t build games anymore Vegas style by reproducing successes bigger, better, faster & stronger. Online games are just beginning and we don’t know yet what the rules are for them. We learn along the way and creating experience on how to set out a great story.

There was also a lot of talk about casual and more accessible games. People want more and more micro-sized content for quick experiences. How Facebook is also a game as it has a repeat until reward structure. Games should be a balance of Mechanics (rules of play), Dynamics (human interaction with rules) en Aesthetics (feel, design, emotion). Those last three just connected too good with our Lable vision of creating balance between Technology (structure), Human and Feeling. Those should be the main design rules of the future!

New view on location

Paul Dourish had some nice insights from aboriginals. How they looked very different to locations, territory, objects. Everything was defined by stories and their influence zones. This kind of thinking could make us very differently to navigation and location based information. He wanted to propose a new vocabulary for this tech: Nomad, pilgrimage, home, colony, asylum, diaspora, migrator etc.

Clash of Nature and Technology

Kevin Warwick, the human cyborg, was a show stealer. He described how he connected a ultra sound sensor to his arm neural system and how he gained a 6th sense of distance. That a human could just learn a sensor so fast. He also connected his neural system to his wive to create the first two brains in one neural system. How they shared the sense of moving hands. His brain was even connected to the internet to control a simple robotic arm thousands of miles away… Cyborgs are getting real… And it sounded like a real enhancement that did not sound scary anymore… But what about the spam you will get

We heard from Mieke Gerritzen how we should accept tech and how we should make it a part of nature. How everything is set to intertwine. How manipulating nature will become the next nature. I did not entirely agree because I think there is still lots to learn from current nature before we declare a next one. We should accept the golden ratio as the main ratio for growth and design.

Sustainability

We can’t continue to consume the way we are. A whole separate track was focused on the environment with key speaker Nobel Prize winner Andy Reisinger. The most head shifting tech featured was a space based solar array with power beaming to the earth as a way to solve future power problems. Also features were technologies to convert people to more sustainable ways of working by peer pressured social networks.

Foresight

We ended with some views on how to see the road ahead but where also warned to look at a higher level to see what other roads will cross this road. William Cockayne and Scott Smith took us on a ride on what a foresighter, like the main audience of Lift, should do to make good foresights.

A foresighter:

• Should be aware
• Scan Collect and Organize Patterns and deep currents and roles
  • Get out on the street
• Have a view but not ideologize
• Stay Grounded
  • Leave behind artefacts

These talks made me aware I am such foresighter. Not focusing on the now but the future by talking around and collecting information and feelings.

The Future

Scott left us with a quote of William Gibson:

The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.

I think Lift changed that and created a place of were foresights are made visible. Foresights of a future where humans will live in balance with technology and feelings. A future where they would connect with each other and everything around them to create a more sustainable and efficient balance. We just need to digest everything around us to see how it should be done.

I recognized many pieces of my past journey and was confirmed I am on the right road. It is just about meeting the right people and making it possible.

Yes, it is all just about people.

Visit Lift site for more information. All talks can be viewed on tsr site.

Photo by mrtnk who was sitting besides me while taking photo. It shows the shoes of Lift organizer Laurent Haug opening Lift 08.

In 1989 the internet was invented by Tim Berners-Lee. He created it as a place for data, information and knowledge exchange.

The main method was hypertext. This is not text that stands on itself but links to many other texts containing its context. All links together define a web of information. The connections lifts the separate text to form a more holistic whole: A web of knowledge that transcends the information.

Semantic Web

But an internet that only consists of text is only easily readable by people. People have to follow the links and scavenge the text for information. For computers it is not as easy. For this mr Berners-Lee came with a vision of a Semantic Web.

“I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”

He described it as a system in which all words are provided with meaning: semantics. So computers can easily read what the letters/words are and find out what it all means. This so computers can scavenge text easier to find new meanings, to find new connections, to find new links.

Locked in paths

But where is it? A nice dream which is still not here… Why not? It is too difficult to create. Why write a text and provide all kinds of words with subtext? Why create separate layers of text for people and computers? Why lock it in into the same limitations as human text: linearity…

Linearity makes a text a one dimensional string. By scanning the string you can with Berner-Lees invention of hypertext choose a new path defined by the creator of the previous string. We are still locked into the document, the path delved out by the writer… It is an evolutionary step but not the endgoal for a true knowledge web.

Semantic Web evolved

To really set free a semantic web it should be free of the limitations of words. Maybe a node inside such web can link to a word, and the connections between nodes can be translated with grammar rules to text, so the knowledge can be formed on the spot in the form which is needed.

Our brain works the same. We don’t save knowledge in our heads in strings of words. We don’t walk the whole textual story of acquiring the knowledge to get to the element we seek. We create and follow direct connections to it. And by following the connections from that connection we create context, story. A story that is right for the moment.

The internet should be the same: free of text but full of links to create a real boom of knowledge. Then we can finally connect everything we know and create the rebirth of our collective intelligence.

Related

• End of Text: Locked in knowledge
• End of Text: knowledge = connections!

Image by Robert Hodgin, visit his webpage flight 404 for more supergreat work!