Professor OWL explains the Semantic Web with a video

I have now learnt how to make videos which can be used to illustrate aspects of what I and others are doing and trying to do. The raw material is video footage, voiceovers, captions, slides, hyperlinks, etc. I’m not a great fan of talking heads on videos (e.g. simply staring at the builtin webcam and talking for an hour. When I recently told by OKF colleagues I had a short video of 5 minutes they howled in protest : “short is 30 seconds”. Point taken.

Short is good. It’s hard to do it well because you have to work out what you want to say rather than waffling. I’ve been working with slides changing every 3-7 seconds. That’s hard work but feedback is good – people don’t seem to think it’s too fast. But it’s not easy to explain some things in less than minutes or hours and the semantic web is one of those. There is a level of complexity that cannot be avoided. It’s like musical scales. So we need lessons.

Yesterday I met Professor OWL (her name is capitalised and you will see why). We were walking back along Trumpington Street when Judith spotted a charity basket of toys in Little St Mary’s. Professor OWL is an RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowy_Owl and comes equipped with a real recording of a snowy owl in the Shetlands. Press her and she speaks. Here she is:

The animals have asked her to give a tutorial, and here she is with a diagram of the semantic web:

Professor OWL is a very important person in semantic, ontologies and all those things. She’s developed the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Ontology_Language (OWL)

“Surely it should be WOL, not OWL?”

No, Wikipedia says:

Acronym

Why not be inconsistent in at least one aspect of a language which is all about consistency?

—Guus Schreiber, Why OWL and not WOL?^[21]

The natural acronym for Web Ontology Language would be WOL instead of OWL. Although the character Owl from Winnie the Pooh wrote his name WOL, the acronym OWL was proposed without reference to that character, as an easily pronounced acronym that would yield good logos, suggest wisdom, and honor William A. Martin‘s One World Language knowledge representation project from the 1970s.

Professor OWL disputes this. Winnie-ther-Pooh is part of our culture. Rabbit says to WOL: “You and I have brains. The others have fluff.” Professor OWL certainly has brains.

So here ProfOWL is explaining triples (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6280676/swout1.mp4 – about 4 minutes). This time I have videoed myself writing and speaking at the same time. I quite like this medium – it’s far better than the cognitive dissonance of powerpoint. It’s not trivial – make one mistake in writing or speaking and you have to start again. (I made a mistake and there’s a minor glitch). You’ll see that I have skipped some of the repetitive bts – another device would be to run the writing at higher speed and then voice over.

I’ll leave her to explain the Sematic Web . I’d welcome feedback and we’ll get more on Tuesday night at the hackathon.