M's

mark this day

I don't think it's a very good name but we're stuck with it now. The word semantics is used by different groups to mean different things. But now people understand that the Semantic Web is the Data Web. I think we could have called it the Data Web. -- TBL

naked objects and radical tailorability

Naked Objects is a pattern and a framework for creating applications that expose the business objects directly in the user interface.

It provides strong encapsulation of the objects, while still having a data-oriented flair.

The Naked Objects Group has some high profile clients, such as the Department of Social and Family Affairs (DSFA) in Ireland. From the case study:

This system is now intensively used by more than a 100 clerical and management staff, generating more than 250,000 transactions per day. Since May 2006 it has issued more than €1bn in pension entitlements - a mission critical system by any standards. [...]

The previous Child Benefit system, written just five years ago, ran to more than 50,000 lines of business code. A year ago, we claimed to the DSFA management that by re-using the business object model we had created for the Pensions system it should be possible to create the brand new Child Benefit system using less than 1000 lines of custom code (written in VB.Net - the DSFA’s preferred language). When functional development was completed on July 31st, the final tally was 957 lines!

Naked Objects is similar to the golden oldie Oval, from MIT's Center for Coordination Science.

Oval stands for Objects, Views, Agents and Links, and like Naked Objects is a very inspiring system.

The basic idea of Oval is called radical tailorability: once you give your users a few expressive building blocks, they can create their applications for themselves.

Users of this system can create applications by combining and modifying four kinds of building blocks: objects, views, agents, and links. We found that user-level tailoring of these primitives can provide most of the functionality found in well-known cooperative work systems such as gIBIS, Coordinator, Lotus Notes, and Information Lens. These primitives, therefore, appear to provide an elementary "tailoring language" out of which a wide variety of integrated information management and collaboration applications can be constructed by end users.

Must read!

hans rosling: no more boring data

Hans Rosling andare probably doing some of the most relevant work in data understanding and visualization today.

This is a nice, twenty-minute overview of their thinking and some of their work.

You can try the visualization tools presented at tools.google.com/gapminder.

gibsonesque

Things that gave me a Gibsonesque feeling lately:

``Business Bay'' in Dubai

Walmart Clinics

Wall Street renting out rack space

Piracy attack maps

This photo

data search systems

File systems and databases provide different ways of organizing data to help find structure and meaning in what you've stored, but they're not the only approaches possible.  Moreover, the structure they provide is really for one purpose: to simplify accessing it.  Once you realize it's the access, not the structure, that matters, the whole debate changes character. -- Rob Pike Responds

Yesterday I searched for "snort license". Surprisingly, this is what Google returned:

Snort — License: GNU General Public License
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snort_(software)

which means that Google has special code to detect queries about licenses. Nice! (Actually I cringed.)

Data Search

Obviously, the next step is extending this to arbitrary properties, e.g., "rob pike's email", and including synonyms in the search.

There's a joke that there are only two hard things in CS, cache invalidation and naming things (due to Phil Karlton), and resolving such queries is as big a naming problem as it gets. (General question answering is of course harder, but we aren't there yet.)

Basically, you want to be as sloppy as possible in recognizing the query terms, the system should work even if you talk to it on the phone.

For that, we need something even beyond megadatabases, we need data search systems.

Data Search Systems

A data search system answers queries about properties of things (e.g., "elvis' address"). Input, queries, and output are close to natural language.

• Thanks to the R in REST, data search systems can always fall back to fuzzy results, or add additional information that may or may not be helpful to the user.
• Data search systems do away with notions about ultra-precise naming and use an acoustic approach to query recognition, and ontological knowledge to find synonyms.
• Data search systems snarf the whole world wide web, looking for patterns humans use to express data in writing, such as "bedrooms: 2" or "2 bedrooms". (See humane metadata syntax.)
• seems to be in the best position to make real data search possible, but technical advances will soon allow a kid with an OLPC to kick their ass.

Dig we must!

plus ca change

By popular demand (hi zanardi!) and crypto-snarkiness (hi chris!), I've reverted the blog back to the old, two-column layout. Anyway, I'm hoping to leave the Typepad silo behind for something better soon.

How rich are desktop apps anyway?

Time and time again, I stumble over a blog post that claims that web apps will soon be "as rich as desktop apps". I hope not. The desktop era is over, and good riddance.

Take Twitter. If Twitter were a desktop app it probably would be less useful than it is now. Why?

• Entering a new item probably would be hidden under File > New and be a modal dialog.
• I probably would need to save my items regularly.
• I probably couldn't link to a friend or bookmark items.
• I probably couldn't open it from my cell phone.
• I probably couldn't whip up a quick script to fetch or enter some data.
• I probably couldn't leave or pause the application just by closing a window or opening a new tab.

In these respects, desktop apps SUCK BIG TIME compared to most web apps.

So in what respect are desktop apps richer? Let's look at Adobe Photoshop, a classical rich desktop app. Besides menus and toolbars there's really only one thing that is rich about Photoshop, the canvas. And even that is now available to web apps. Photoshop simply has no visual richness beyond the canvas.

In my opinion, the freedoms (no modal dialogs) and affordances (bookmarks, universal access) offered by most web apps far outweigh any additional richness offered by so-called rich desktop apps. So please, don't drool over some stupid framework like the DOSolate One's Silverlight, which will bring back nothing but a wave of modal dialogs and File menus.

Take the superficial primitivity of HTML, and like Google, del.icio.us, and Twitter, turn it into something extremely useful to millions of people.

The convergence of games and "serious" apps is starting for real... here's a nice network simulator (via chl):

Also:

• MMRPG meets project management
• Querying Business Processes
• "If I drag a coworker to the trash, does that mean he gets fired?"

Core processes require a certain semantic consistency that is certified by a vendor and compliant with authorities. You do not want your General Ledger going out of whack, just because you connected a web service the wrong way to a process that was assembled from multi-vendor pieces. Think of the set of core processes and the master data they require as the part of the brain that takes care of the involuntary actions of our body – like breathing and digesting – you do it, but you don’t think about it, and you definitely don’t want anything messing around with that part of the brain. 

<Shai Agassi>

word

People turn to software to learn the meaning of words, learn which countries were bombed today, and learn to cook a paella. They decide which music to play, which photos to print, and what to do tonight, tomorrow, and Tuesday at 2:00. They keep track of a dozen simultaneous conversations in private correspondence, and maybe hundreds in public arenas. They browse for a book for Mom, a coat for Dad, and a car for Junior. They look for an apartment to live in, and a bed for that apartment, and perhaps a companion for the bed. They ask when the movie is playing, and how to drive to the theater, and where to eat before the movie, and where to get cash before they eat. They ask for numbers, from simple sums to financial projections. They ask about money, from stock quote histories to bank account balances. They ask why their car isn’t working and how to fix it, why their child is sick and how to fix her. They no longer sit on the porch speculating about the weather—they ask software.
(Bret Victor)