tagging

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.

Apr 26 2009   8:09PM GMT

The world of advanced Web applications: what are they?

Posted by: Roger “Buzz” King
Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web, XML, mashups, wikis, social networking sites, tagging, distance education, zenbe.com, evernote, GlideOS, namespaces, web services

This blog is dedicated to an ongoing discussion of Web 2.0/3.0 and the Semantic Web. The slant is on the technology itself, how it works and what’s going on inside advanced Web applications. We’ve looked at a couple different Web 2.0, in particular, Evernote and GlideOS. We’ve tried to characterize the capabilities of Web apps.

The impact of the new Web.

This posting addresses a non-technical question: What has been the impact of this technology our society?

Technological advancement can be very roughly broken into two groups: incremental and radical. Which of these is Web 2.0/3.0? Is it a radical advance?

Consider what highly responsive, multimedia web applications have done for us. They have enabled the development of:

* Wikis: These are web applications that allow us to collaboratively develop sophisticated, easily searchable information bases. These can range from dictionaries for specialized disciplines to vast databases containing DNA information. Data can be vetted by experts and/or challenged by random users.

Everybody knows about Wikipedia, but like blog and bulletin board software, wiki software can be easily installed and configured for deployment on almost any web server, whether it is publicly accessible, or used privately within a corporation or by a professional organization.

* Social networking sites: These are web applications that allow us to actively participate in a myriad of communities based on professional and personal interests. We find work, develop contacts, share music and photographs and video, and develop lifelong collaborations with people we would never have met otherwise.

They are also used by people who are in daily physical contact, but who find they can deepen their relationships by posting personal information on public sites like MySpace and Facebook. The interesting thing about these sites is that new and successful ones keep emerging,

* Tagged content vendor sites: Volunteers and paid individuals can contribute multimedia content and collaboratively tag it, using both freeform and highly sophisticated tagging protocols, such as the sophisticated MPEG-7 standard. (We will look at MPEG-7 in a future posting of this blog.) These include images and sound and video, and many taggers are highly trained professionals who can carefully categorize content according its detailed meaning. This technology makes a vast sea of otherwise-unknown assets available to us. It also makes these assets searchable, thus transforming a completely intractable task into something we easily perform.

In particular, this has radically enhanced the creative power of both professional and hobbyist animators by giving them complex scenery and character components to work with. Check out thoughtequity.com for an example of a content vendor. Take a look at daz3d.com for animation content.

* Mashups: These are portal or second tier web applications that take content from other web sources, such as Google Maps, investment information, medical advice, and scientific data. Often mashups take data from several or hundreds of other sites and create complex, highly valuable multimedia assets.

Take a look at woozor.com. It combines Google map and weather data.

* Distance learning: Universities, corporations, professional organizations, and lone instructors can develop and sell effective, multimedia educational packages that bring education to anyone who has Internet access. This allows us to retrain ourselves for new occupations, stay current in our professional skills, and find employment that is satisfying, steady, and high paying.

I teach on my university’s distance learning site, and we use video, sound, desktop video capture, slide presentations, and software demonstrations - and they can all be edited into a unified product. There are online universities now, where you can get a college degree. Take a look at jonesuniversity,com.

* Hybrid applications that support things like email, calendar, collaboration, RSS feeds, etc.

A good example of a hybrid application is zenbe.com, which provides a combined web-based email, list making, and calendar application, and in that sense is similar to many other email providers. But Zenbe also provides a collaborative tool called Zenbe Pages, which can be used by collaborators to organize their activities. A Zenbe page can have notes, calendars, lists, RSS feeds (not new ones, but existing RSS feeds) on them. Zenbe also provides quick access to Twitter, Google Talk, and Facebook.

By the way, it’s important to point out that the categories I list above are not as clear-cut as one might think. Many modern web apps contain elements from more than one of these categories.

The software building blocks.

From a programming perspective, what specific Web 2.0/3.0 software has allowed all of this to come about? We’ve discussed much of this already in previous postings of this blog. It includes XML and the exploding class of XML languages, namespaces, IDE’s (Integrated Development Environments), large code bases (such as the vast library of ready-made Java components), web service software development tools, and AJAX web page optimization technology. It also includes web development frameworks like Ruby on Rails, and newer ones, engineered toward high responsiveness, like Flex and Silverlight.

Also included are powerful media formats, codecs, players, and editors, which allow web users to do more than upload and search media; we can edit it and reform video, images, and sound, without leaving the simple world of our browsers. And of course, modern mega media apps enable us to build media assets. The list of contributing software tools goes on, but we’ll stop here.

It scales!

And there is something subtle, but important that gives advanced web technology extraordinary power: it scales. We manage shared resources that are truly gigantic in size, and are spread across countless machines around the world. We leverage global user bases, cheap server technology, and wide open Internet bandwidth to give media stores belonging to Web apps astonishing growth rates.

The bottom line.

Yep. Web 2.0/3.0, as a whole, is a truly radical advancement. It has fundamentally and globally changed society in a big way.