tbl+13 – the magic exposed (if not explained)

Here is the theme from TBL’s keynote: (slide 14/39)

The Two Magics of Web Science. He used many examples of the slide below, emphasizing the cyclic nature of the process. Start at the top and cycle clockwise.

This shows how Google evolved – a need (or issue) – developments in technology and social structure – success – and then the dark side (in this case spoofing) starts to foul the system. Here’s a similar ddiagram for wikis

The stars (dotted lines) are the magic – you need both. Creativity has been common but collaboration – real collaboration – is rarer. Sometimes it evolves – e.g. in flickr, where people tag each others’ slides – sometimes its built into the system such as in bioinformatics. Here’s blogs

and here is the bottom-up – or lowercase – semantic web.

So the challenge for the Blue Obelisk community and the blogosphere is what we can do to maximise the chance of building – or evolving – collaboration. Of course we have that on Sourceforge but we need to move to a wider community – the excitement of the blogosphere – the Blue Obelisk Cemetery, etc.
When I tell people here about the coherence, excitement and qaulity of the chemical blogosphere they are impressed. There are certainly other communities in other disciplines but Chemistry can feel it’s making excellent progress. In the next posts I’ll explain how easy it is to create the lc-semantic web and what benefits it will bring us. Don’t be frightened of SPARQL (a query language), RDF (the basis of the semantic web) or OWL (an ontology reasoning language). There are – now – sufficient tools to tackle this.