This talk (based on a previous blog post here) goes into some detail about how I use HTTP, JSON and other web-oriented tech in my iPhone work.

In his talk, Tom very kindly references a talk I gave at last year’s XTech conference. It’s based on a great deal of work he and I did together at the BBC, and endless conversations that we’ve had on the nature of the web. It’s called The Application of Weblike Design to Data: Designing Data for Reuse and hopefully those slides are some use to those seeking background for Tom’s narrative.

I’m not living in London at the moment so I missed seeing Tom present at the recent Carson Future of Web Apps event. Luckily, they’ve made MP3s available of all the talks there, so you can hear the talk too. I just saw him speak at ETech 2006, and I was blown away by the clarity, consistency and depth of the ideas. Don’t miss it.

This presentation examines the problem of semantic web crawling – following links from document to document and gathering the results for searching. Unlike centralised web search facilities, semantic web agents will be distributed, personalised and often highly domain-specific. How can we hold the entire world inside our laptops?

The W3C vision for the Semantic Web is “an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation”. It is “the representation of data on the World Wide Web”, expressed using the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Just as the web grew in usefulness as it was traversed, indexed and searched by systems such as Lycos, Altavista and Google, the semantic web requires technologies that can crawl, aggregate and query the RDF data.

This talk presents a modular semantic web crawler designed to explore the provision of services to applications. It highlights differences from and similarities to existing web search systems that gather their source data from the public web.

Rather than have web crawling and aggregation built into every semantic web application, agents will be able to call on aggregation services via webservices, be notified of new resources by publish-and-subscribe mechanisms, or simply receive a stream of RDF statements as they are found. A number of different RDF storage mechanisms are tested, including traditional relational databases and RDF toolkits such as Redland.

Applications will be discussed in the areas of social networks (using the Friend Of A Friend vocabulary) and personal publishing. Models for providing centralised services to lighter-weight agents (such as mobile applications) are explored, and important issues such as trust and attribution of information are covered.

The demos:

• Wordnet namespace entry for building
• Picdiary home page
• RSS for Picdiary home page
• Picdiary polaroids view
• Pictures of Edd Dumbill
• Pictures of Edd Dumbill, RSS source
• Wordnet-based search for skyscraper
• Wordnet-based search for building
• Wordnet-hierarchy-nav for structure

The logs on the IRC #www2003 channel during the talk are interesting to compare with the slides.

The talk was scheduled amongst a fun-packed Semantic Web series of Celia Romaniuk (Soap Operas and the Semantic Web), Uche Ogbuji (Akara – Part Wiki, Part Blog, Powered by XML and RDF), Jo Walsh (Collaborative Mapping with RDF) and myself.

The slides (in PDF created using AxPoint) are brief but hopefully useful. At the same meeting, Celia talked about her work at the BBC on modelling Eastenders plots in RDF and Jo talked about spacenamespace, mudlondon and collaborative mapping. It was great to chat to people in the pub afterwards and see a lot of enthusiasm for the ideas.