rich internet apps

Oct 18 2009   10:37PM GMT

Personal Information Management Applications and Web 3.0

Posted by: Roger “Buzz” King
advanced Web apps, databases, information, media applications, Multimedia, note-taking, notebooks, rich internet apps, tagging, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, web applications

This blog is devoted to the discussion of Semantic Web and Web 2.0/3.0 technology.

Managing personal and small group information.

When it comes to so-called Web 2.0 and 3.0 technology, one of the most proliferate marketplaces involves the explosion of applications for managing information for individuals and small groups. Looking only at applications developed for Macs, we see an array of information management technologies.

Notebooks.

One of the most popular formats for managing information uses the paradigm of a notebook. The user can create a notebook, often selecting from multiple canned formats, such as a diary, class notes, or a novel, complete perhaps with a notebook cover and a spiral wire down the left side. The application creates a table of contents, and users can create sections and pages - and stuff virtually any kind of information on each page. Two very good examples of this approach are NoteShare and Notebook.

Interestingly, and perhaps because many of the applications in this category have been around for a number of years, these tend to not be true web applications. Often you can share notebooks, including full read/write access, via a URL and a simple browser interface, and you can publish a notebook at a URL. But the products are primarily for single-user, desktop use.

A good example of a notebook application that is a true web application is Zoho Notebook. (Zoho actually provides a large set of web based applications, of which the note program is just one.)

Buckets.

The other very popular note format uses the bucket or folder approach. The application may or may not support the nesting of these buckets and/or the creation of conceptual buckets, so that a given note can exist in more than one bucket. Two very good applications that use this approach are SOHO Notes and Yojimbo. These two applications are desktop-based, although most applications in this category support the synching of notes over multiple machines, using the Apple web-synching technology.

A hybrid desktop/web application is Evernote, which has elegant desktop applications for Windows machines, Macs, and a variety of handhelds and cell phones. It also has a very effective web interface. The user can sync multiple Evernote desktop instances via Evernote’s web server. Users can thus avoid ever using the web interface.

Outlines.

One specialized sort of information management application involves the creation of embedded outlines and bulleted lists. These applications, such as OmniOutliner, actually provide a full notebook functionality as well. OmniOutliner notebooks can be published on the web, but it is very definitely a desktop application.

Task lists.

An even more specialized class of information management applications support To-Do lists. Great examples are Zenbe Lists (they also provide integrated email and collaborative software) and rememberthemilk.com. These are web applications.

Photos and video.

There are a rapidly growing number of applications that allow users to collect, sort, tag, edit, and share photographs and video. Apple’s iPhoto is a great example. It is very much a desktop app, although applications in this class typically support the publication of images and video on the web, and sometimes, even read/write access via the web.

Stories, scripts, novels, and storyboards.

There are a number of highly specialized applications that support the development of fiction, including Final Draft and Montage (scripts), Scrivener and StoryMill (fiction prose), and Toon Boom storyboard (which is actually an impressive drawing program). Again, users can often publish to the web. Interestingly, many of these applications can easily be used as full blown, generic note applications, and can manage many forms of media.

Diary Applications.

Perhaps the most popular diary application on Macs is MacJournal (by the Montage and StoryMill folks). An interesting twist is that it is also an excellent blogging program. I use it to write this blog. This is, of course, one of the most widely used vehicles for sharing information on the web, and you can expect other sorts of personal information management systems to have blogging capabilities added to them.

Small, forms-based database management systems.

These applications are desktop apps. Apple’s Bento is a very good example. It actually is a sort of hybrid database/spreadsheet application. The most recent release allows multiple instances of Bento to share databases running on computers on a shared network.

Mind-Mapping.

The “circles and lines” applications have become highly specialized. The most well known one is MindManager, and there are versions for Windows machines and Macs. These are desktop apps. The vender, MindJet, recently introduced both web interfaces for sharing and updating desktop mind maps, as well as a web-based application that has a fresh, smooth interface, and provides team collaboration tools. Many forms of media can be placed in MindManager, including data from a wide variety of relational database management systems.

Screen and audio capture.

There are a number of applications that allow users to capture desktop video, along with audio voice-overs. Camtasia (which has Windows and Mac products) and Screenium are popular products.

These applications are, in a way, successors to slide applications like Microsoft Powerpoint and Apple Keynote. More and more presentations are being engineered with screen capture and audio applications, and these applications often support text and image data, as well as the insertion of video capture of the speaker. Sometimes, Powerpoint slides can be imported.

Conferencing apps.

There are several applications that provide hybrid desktop/browser live communication, including video, sound, and collaborative white-boarding. The best known one is probably Cisco WebEx, which comes in varieties for Macs and Windows machines. Skype supports a similar, limited product - which is free. One of the nice things about these products is that they come with their own voice lines. Other products, like Adobe ConnectNow, require the use of a cell phone to carry voice. With most of these products, a conference can be recorded for later use.

Finally…

Importantly, we note that in this rapidly-exploding marketplace, the borders between these various categories are being broken down, and applications often support a number of these capabilities at once. A good example is Curio, a desktop application that supports notes, lists, video, audio, white-boarding, mind-mapping, and limited web publishing.

Oct 3 2009   9:12PM GMT

Multimedia: The Problem of Subtle Semantics

Posted by: Roger “Buzz” King
3D animation, 3D modeling, advanced Web apps, automating Web searches, blob data, continuous data, databases, information, Multimedia, rich internet apps, Semantic Web, smart search engines, tagging, Text, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, web applications, Web development, Web development frameworks, XML

The challenge of the Semantic Web.

We’ve looked at the emerging Semantic Web technology in the previous postings of this blog. The idea is to have a far, far smarter Web, one where the process of finding and interpreting and making use of far flung information can be largely automated. This is in sharp contrast with today’s Web, where these things have to be done in a painful, extremely time-consuming fashion.

So that is the key challenge. It has to do with searching the kinds of information that are important to us in our daily lives. This information, as it turns out, is very difficult to process automatically. Why is this?

The complexity of modern multimedia.

I teach a very basic 3D animation class to mostly computer science students. We use Maya, arguably the most popular 3D animation application, one that is used in the making of many animated features. The interesting thing about animation is that it is truly multimedia. It can give us a lot of insight into what we need the new Web to do for us.

That’s because the number and diversity of applications that are used for drawing, documenting, modeling, animating, motion capture, texturing, video rendering, video editing, video conversion and compression, sound editing, in even small projects, can be very impressive. Correspondingly, the wide variety and complexity of media formats involved in an animation project can be overwhelming.

What happens in an animation project? The workflow might begin with vector storyboard drawings to break the story down into scenes. In a typical animation project, 3D models in a variety of proprietary formats are used. Models must be transformed as they are exported from one application and imported into the next. Multiple video renders of animated models are made, and they must be edited together, along with multiple sound files. Multiple video and audio formats might be used. 2D images are used for textures; photographs of butterfly wings can be used to make an animated butterfly very realistic, and a checkerboard image made with Photoshop can be used to make a Linoleum floor. And along the way, a variety of note taking, screen capture, and conferencing software might be used to facilitate group communication.

There is also a heavy focus on reuse in an animation project. Building every model, editing every texture, creating every environment and background, recording every sound from scratch is frequently intractable. If existing assets cannot be tailored and reused, the project would be far too expensive and time consuming, and would demand too wide a variety of professionals to always be available. This raises the multimedia stakes, as assets of widely differing forms must be constantly reconfigured and used in concert in new ways.

But what’s the real problem? We aren’t all trying to produce complex animated videos. But very interestingly, in our everyday lives we essentially face the animator’s challenge when we try to find and use information on the Web. That’s because we’re often looking for things whose meaning, whose interpretation, demands focused human thought. We are looking not for business data, but for pieces of media, and the problem is that today, most of our searching has to be based on tags or brief textual descriptions that are associated with pieces of media, and not on the true meaning of the media itself.

The needs of the business world are not our needs.

It’s the subjective nature of media assets - this is what is at the heart of the problem facing us. Existing technology for searching the web is based on keywords and very short pieces of text.

There is other technology, though, under active development, stuff that serves as the information storage backbone of most commercial websites. It’s the technology that has for decades been used in-house (not on the Web) by businesses when they process large databases. But this stuff was designed to handle traditional business data forms, like integers, character strings, real numbers, dates, timestamps, and full text.

There is more, though. All of the major database management systems, along with tools for building and searching advanced websites are being retrofitted (or in some cases, built from the ground up) to manage more than keywords and text, more than standard business data.

But up to now, the focus has not been on supporting the kinds of information you and I are most interested in. The focus has been on extending database and Web technology to support xml documents, as well as more complex data objects, like those inside a Java program, as well as other forms of data found inside programs. This includes arrays and lists and short pieces of textual data, like the names of diseases.

In other words, we’ve been busy extending our support of the business world, so they can store complex business data in databases and make that information processable over the Web. You and I have largely been left out.

Finally, we are attacking our needs.

But there now many ongoing efforts to extend database and Web technology to make it useful to us. The new focus is on supporting blob and continuous media like images, video, and audio. This is extremely hard to do.

Why? Because the strongest means by which we deduce the meeting of business data is by looking at its internal structure and the terms that are used to describe that structure. A relational table named Prescriptions, with a character attributes Patient Name, Doctor’s Name, and Medication, and with a numeric attribute Dosage, is pretty easy to interpret.

But what do we do with a photograph, which is just a grid of pixels with no internal structure? Or a long series of images, along with a sound track, put together to form a piece of video?

The U.S. military has been pumping money into image processing for several decades, and so all is not lost. There is a vast body of mathematical research and software development that allows us to write programs that can find a particular face in a crowd and search satellite photos for airplane runways. But in general, we cannot at this time write a program that can process an arbitrary photo or video clip and tell us what it means. That means we can’t quickly search vast media database for useful pieces of information.

The goal behind the Semantic Web effort is to build a new generation of websites whose information can be searched automatically, and where information from multiple sites can be automatically integrated. To do this with numeric and character based data is quite doable. But when it comes to multimedia, like images and sound and video and 3D models and engineering designs, well, we have a long way to go. The meaning - in other words, the semantics - of these forms of data are complex and subtle, and highly dependent upon an individual’s interpretation of that media.

So, we see that we have only just begun our journey to create the new Web.

Mar 11 2009   8:24PM GMT

Web services: part of the Web 2.0 & Semantic Web picture

Posted by: Roger “Buzz” King
Multimedia, Rich Web Apps, the Semantic Web, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Web development, rich internet apps, web services

This is the fifth in a series of blogs about the Semantic Web and Web 2.0/3.0. While the sequence of blog posts tell a continuous story, each blog should be fully informative if read out of sequence.

So far, we’ve discussed the Semantic Web, which is an attempt at automating the process of searching the web and integrating the results, and Web 2.0/3.0, which is largely oriented toward making media-intensive web applications highly responsive. (We noted in an earlier blog that Web 3.0 is an extension of Web 2.0, and we will look at this transition in a fugure blog.)

But there’s a third term that is often thrown into the mix: web services. What are they?

A web service is a web application that is not accessed interactively by a human, but rather by a program.

To make use of a website, we load a URL into a browser and visit the site. Once we’re there, we might - even if we don’t realize it - be operating a very sophisticated application, like Amazon. We can search their inventory - which sits inside a very large database - via Amazon’s search form.

But there’s something else you can do with Amazon. We can access their inventory via a web service. Or more precisely, we can build programs that can access their inventory by communicating with programs (called web services) that they have provided. Our programs and their programs talk to each other directly. These services can be used to do things that would usually would be very time-consuming, and in fact, often intractable, if performed with a browser. Their web services also allow third party vendors to post their stock on Amazon, and in return for a fee, let Amazon sell and ship their products. Thus, independent vendors can easily make themselves an extension of Amazon, something that works so smoothly that if we don’t look carefully, we might not realize we are buying something that is not directly marketed by Amazon.

The way a web service works is by the provider of the service (such as Amazon) making the interface to the software that implements the service publicly accessible over the Internet. Such an interface is called an Application Programming Interface, or API. This way, anyone who wants to write a program that will access the service over the web knows exactly how to write their program to talk to the web service. These programs that access web services are called “client” applications.

There is a wide class of web services available on the Internet, and many of them provide APIs that allow programmers to write software that can access vast databases of such things as news and real estate information. Many web services also are available via a website, for users who want to use the service interactively. And many client applications are really just doing the same thing a browser might do when accessing a website, except that the client is likely to be a far more specialized application and it runs as a desktop application on your machine. More importantly, that client program might be able to things that your browser cannot do.

For example, there is a web service called MusicBrainz; it provides information about music, not the music itself. It can be accessed via an API. There is also a website, MusicBrainz.org, where you can search the database interactively. The API might be accessed by a CD player application; it can communicate with MusicBrainz (without you knowing it) to download information about whatever CD you happen to be listening to on your desktop. It might enable your CD player to tell you the artist’s name and variations of that name, the release date, the catalog number, etc.

Since part of the idea is that we don’t have to directly interact with web services by using a browser, their explosive growth has been very quiet. Many websites are powered by input they get by using web service APIs. These second-hand websites are often called “portals”, and many portals integrate information from a number of sources and give you access to information that would otherwise be very tedious to find on your own. Web services are thus a critical building block for many of the multimedia, highly interactive websites that constitute much of the Web 2.0 effort.

In fact, they underscore the difficulty in making a sharp distinction between the Semantic Web and Web 2.0/3.0. This is because both of them depend highly on automating the movement of information around the Internet. A Web 2.0 website (often called a web application because it provides fast access to complex information, in particular, sound, images, and/or video) cannot answer your search request quickly unless it has ongoing, rapid access to underlying streams of information on the web. But this capability, of providing us with information integrated from multiple websites, is actually a cornerstone of the emerging Semantic Web.

The difference is that the Semantic Web will (hopefully) someday put a tremendous amount of smarts into web services, and allow us to locate, transform, and integrate information in extremely complex ways. The Semantic Web, in this sense, can be viewed as an extremely aggressive extent of the Web 2.0/3.0 effort.

So there we have it. Web services, in their hidden way, are rapidly evolving the web into something incredibly powerful.