Anyone who ever tried to google my name, must have noticed the existence of another being bearing the same name – a being with a radically different interests from mine. Namely, a Serbian folk-music singer. Due to the same name, I constantly receive e-mails from his admirers, but recently, I’ve got acquainted with a song dedicated to the emerging Social Web phenomena. In this song, Milan identifies Facebook and MySpace to be the sources of alienation between couples as well as the inspirations of jealousy and other unfortunate social phenomena. All this demonstrates a high level of understanding that the Serbian folk industry (which I usually consider to be of the worst kind) has developed for the Social Web.

Some of the interesting rhyme, translated to english would be:
“‘…Disconnect from the net,
log out from chat.
Isn’t the real world better from the virtual one?
Come on, get out from Face
give up MySpace….”

Certainly interesting. It would be interesting to observe a moment when Semantic Web reaches the same kind of awarencess. Maybe then we could really say it has become a reality.

Thanks to Uros for pointing out this song to me.

Next week I will be attending the Summer School of  Semantic Web, and there I will present a new poster about my current work on Online Presence,  more precisely – Faceted Online Presence. You might get some insights into what I am up to, from the poster itself, and I hope to be able to disclose more details through academic papers that are submitter for review.

I wrote earlier about the need to appear differently to different people in the online world (to have different status messages and different availability for different groups of people). Having this all in mind I think there is a need to look at the notion of online presence as a faceted phenomenon. For this reason I present the notion of presence diamond to capture the faceted nature of presence and the need to appear differently to different groups of people.

The notion of presence diamond allows us to look at a person’s online presence as a diamond whereas different observers are introduced to different facets of the diamond. Facets differ among themselves in :

• Different types of presence data that is accessible by observers of a facet (like in cases where a user specifies a group of people who cannot see his location/or his status message regardless of the location/message);
• Different granularity of information accessible (like giving exact location to friends and only country or city information to strangers);
• Different data that is emitted to different observers (like having totally different status messages and different availability for different groups of contacts).

I believe this notion can help understand and study the faceted nature of presence and identity in general.

Acknowledgement
The figure and the notion of the Presence Diamond are strongly inspired by the notion of the diamond of digital identity, that Mike Roch,  from University of Reading, introduced at the Eduserv Digital Identity Workshop in London, January 08, 2009

Dictionaries of the world’s major languages were updated with a new verb a couple of years ago – the word to google something or somebody. The vocabulary enrichment was needed to support Google’s great success in attempt to organize the word’s information and make it universally accessible through their search engine.

A couple of days ago, Google announced a new product – Wave that could once again require dictionaries to be changed, to include the new meaning of the verb to wave. The idea behind Wave is to integrate all your interactions in the Social Web into an appealing, usable interface with a lot of handy features to make use of your interactions record. It will encompass e-mail, chat and everything that is going on on the Social Web.

The problem of interconnecting users’ communications scattered over different sources (e.g., integrating comments made to a blog post on different places where the post is accessible) has been known in the research community for quite some time, and some technologies are already developed to target it (like SIOC for example). And Wave is in the line of that same promise – to integrate your communications from different sources and even different communication channels.

However, in my opinion, the importance of its impact will depend primarily on its openness, and ability of users to integrate communications with non-wave users into their interface. If Wave could pick up your interactions on any other social service/platform and organize them in waves, it would have a huge potential. However, for this integration to take place there is a need for interoperability standards. It is a question which standards will Google use?

On the Social Web people expose the nature of their presence to different observers, to different groups of people with whom they are connected in different ways (for instance: co-workers, childhood friends, rugby partners, etc.). However, most often there is only a possibility to share one face with everybody and have the same online status and the same status message for everyone. But many times the information we want to share with one group should be kept private from another. The most extreme examples could be found in the distinction of business contacts and personal friends. Status massages that could be fun to share with friends (e.g. “Peter: totally drunk at the business meeting”) could cost somebody a job if distributed to his boss (business context).

On most social websites the need to appear differently to different groups is largely neglected. Even the Social Networks that allow you to group your friends into friend lists (like Facebook) do not allow for such a separation. Although Facebook friend lists might be used to hide certain types of information from certain groups of friends (e.g., hide status updates or pictures), their potential for showing different status messages to different friends as well as having different availability is largely unmet.

There are however some social apps where you can find partial functionalities to support the faceted nature of your presence online. They appear for now in the form of niche microblogging and micro-broadcasting solutions. Those Social Web sites allow for broadcasting of custom messages in closed communities (like Shoutem) or to people gathered around a certain interest (like Static). However they mostly require for intended recipients of the status message updates to join each closed community which can get quite complicated having in mind the number of intended audiences a user might have. This approach certainly leads to social network fatigue – a phenomenon of loss of motivation to participate in yet another social network when confronted with joining many social networks and building identities on them.

The new service mynameisE can be used to manage adding different people to different social networks according to the nature of the acquaintance (e.g. adding friends to Facebook and business contacts to MySpace). However, it is hard to enforce this separation since not all users are present on each of those networks and therefore some of connections might be lost if they do not meet the purpose one user has given to his/her social network account.

I believe we need a more flexible and more web-wide solution for faceted presence (and faceted identity in general). One of the possibilities is to rely on an open vocabulary to express the dedication of presence information (status message, availability, whatever) to a certain group of people using an open vocabulary (like OPO – Online Presence Ontology). In the recent change of OPO we introduced a set of new classes and properties to enable just this. Maybe this vocabulary change is a little ahead of the state of available applications and services, but is certainly a step towards the faceted presence.

The funny thing with dreams is that when they come true, you are usually unprepared. You nourish your dream; you do all you can for it to grow and someday become a reality, but when reality strikes; when your dream gets out of your hands, you are somehow left alone, without a dream in your heart.

In recent times we are seeing an end of one dream – the dream of the Semantic Web. The originators of the Semantic Web vision agree that “Linked Data is the Semantic Web done right” (Tim Berners Lee), that ‘’Linked Data is the Semantic Web’’ (Jim Hendler). And Linked Data is, without any doubt, a reality. So Semantic Web is a reality. With the announcement of Google that it will support RDFa, the thing goes even further – it becomes the mainstream of the reality, and many people are celebrating it as the beginning of the new era.

Although I have no reasons to believe that Linked Data isn’t the Semantic Web (it is in fact what is explicated as the Semantic Web vision), there are some things that were implicitly related to the core of the vision that remain still far beyond our reach. Even if those things were not the essential part of the vision, they were, I think, a part of the dream. And because of them I understand Linked Data more as ‘’I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.’’(Douglas Adams).

One of those things is reasoning. In the original Semantic Web vision paper it was written: ‘’ For the semantic web to function, computers must have access to structured collections of information and sets of inference rules that they can use to conduct automated reasoning.’’. Reasoning was, therefore, a part of the dream – we needed the Semantic Web for reasoning. However I do not know of a system that can really perform the automated reasoning over the Web of Data. In my opinion, with the current approach to reasoning – purely based on mathematical logics, there will never be a system capable of automated reasoning, or at least there will be no systems capable to mimic human reasoning. Because human reasoning is influenced by emotions, affect, context etc. almost as much as logical rules.

Agents are another thing a bit left behind. We find in the original vision: ‘’ The real power of the Semantic Web will be realized when people create many programs that collect Web content from diverse sources, process the information and exchange the results with other programs.’’. Although the technology exists, we don’t see much of those programs in reality. We might hope that with more data, more agents will grow, but we must have a motivation chain, motivating people to put data on the Web as well as they put Web pages. When you put a Webpage on the Web somebody can see it, and you control the way it is seen, you can also put adds. What do you get if you put raw data? The beauty of the idea is not enough. We must have the technology that creates and supports the motivation chain for putting the raw data on the Web. That means, at least the technology giving you some control of what happens with your raw data after, who can access it, how he can use it, and ensuring he gets punished if he misuse it.

So, a lot of work remains to be done as we embrace the Linked Data reality and say goodbye to the dream of the Semantic Web. But no work will be done if there is no dream. No motivation will exist without a dream. We need another dream.

From the network of interlinked, human-readable documents, the Web evolves to a network of interlinked machine readable data. Where can it evolve further? To a network of interlinked tangible physical things? To a network of interlinked mediated people? Connecting a mind to another mind? Connecting a mind to another thing? Connecting a thing to another thing?

I the last ten days I had the pleasure to visit DERI Institute in Galway, Ireland. While you might be surprised by the lack of my, almost traditional “checklist for a true hedonist”, it is actually the combination of a perfect working environment and truly pleasant people that filled the pleasure dimension of the visit.

In this country of green, of wet snails in the night and cherry blossoms covered with drops of dew in sunlight, I presented my work on Online Presence (you can see the presentation on Slideshare). This time the focus was on my current work on Faceted Presence – the exploration of the fact that people sometimes want to appear differently to different groups of online contacts. The work includes a user study (results will be summarized soon) aimed at discovering the ways people group their contacts and what content do they dedicate to which group in which situation.

However, the highlight of the talk was the presentation “Beyond Social Semantic Web” where I argued that the development of the Semantic Web to date has taken a course of supporting Left Brain functions while it completely neglected emotions, creativity, context – functions of the right Brain.

I also introduced the idea how this situation can be changed and what would be a step on the right. The solution resides in emotions already scattered all over the Web in the form of smileys. I presented the idea of Smiley Ontology that can be used to make the semantics of smileys explicit. Morover, having semantic descriptions of emotions enclosed in smileys might reveal users emotional and affective state at the time of creating certain Web content. The possible connection between Smiley Ontology, SIOC and OPO could make open new possibilities to mapping users ‘emotions and users’ current context with the help of semantics already present in user generated content.

Many thanks to Alex for organizing this visit, and to all other people from DERI for all the inspiring discussions and valuable comments (especially John and Uldis).

In the global overload of predictions for 2009, I taught it would be nice just to tell one New Year’s wish for a change. As you might know the regular mail is highly popular in France (it’s used even for paying your bills, ordering products and all other sorts of things that Web can be more efficiently used for). That made me think about the place of the postal service in the modern world. It will always be a useful thing for sending physical objects, gifts and similar stuff, but the problem occurs with people, who travel a lot – how to deliver regular mail to them on time, wherever they are. So that is my New Year’s – Future of the Web wish. I wish to have a postal service that will bring me my packages and letters wherever I be.

You might say that I’m asking too much. Yes, sometimes I do that , but if you think for a second that I publish my exact location on FireEagle, and that my future trips are published on Dopplr, it is very easy to imagine a postal service that takes a letter addressed with my URI instead of a physical address, and then delivers it to the appropriate place. It would be a postal service that delivers mail from one person to another instead of delivering it from one address to another.

Last week in Karlsruhe, I’ve got an honorable mention for the poster designed by my friend Uros in Hagenberg, following the conception I’ve sent him from Paris, describing the ontology I’ve published in Wien and created earlier in the SpeakEasy cafe in Belgrade.

Dear friends, dedicated readers, citizens of the word, here is my new hedonist list for Paris, hopefully only the first in the series:

• The ultimately expensive, full of nougat and chocolate, creamy Le Nôtre cakes
• Bateaux-Mouches on a sunny day
• Café Viennois at Le Flore en Ile, Ile Saint-Louis with the view on the Notre Dame
• A full moon night at Parc Monceau
• Early autumn lunch at Bagatelle, Bois du Boulogne
• A surprising walk in the Parc de Sceaux
• 30, avenue Montaigne
• Wine and cheese on the Pont des Arts
• Cheese shop at Rue Montorgueil
• Ile des Cygnes on a sunny autumn day
• Wim Wenders and Denis Hopper at La Cinémathèque Française