Planet Semantico

We’re welcoming 2009 by making a new release candidate for Pellet 2.0 available for download. Pellet 2.0 RC4 resolves several issues present in previous release candidates, which are documented more fully in a Pellet Trac report.

The resolved issue that was most likely to have frustrated users was broken import behavior when using the the Pellet command line with the Jena loader. In addition, our effort to support the built-ins listed in the SWRL submission is closer to complete now that the team has added implementation of the built-ins for URIs.

Special thanks to the users who reported issues since most of the changes in this release were made in response to user identified problems. Keep up the good work by sending your bug reports to the Pellet users mailing list.

English

En los ultimos meses diferentes áreas de investigación orientadas a la administración de empresa han vuelto su mirada hacía el fenómeno "Web 2.0" y "Web 3.0".
Hace ya unos años McAfee introdujo el término Enterprise 2.0 para definir las tecnologías 2.0 aplicadas a procesos de negocio. Y si puede parecer divertido tener una Wikipedia que defina los conceptos propios de una empresa, McAfee advierte que no es suficiente crear un espacio de colaboración para que los empleados lo utilicen. Al problema de instaurar una cultura de colaboración ("¿porque trabajar más?" se pregunta el empleado..) se suma la dificultad de la gestión de la potencial gran cantidad de información. La solución pasa (también) por la adopción de tencologías que ayuden y soporten los usuarios para que se pueda explotar de la manera mas eficaz y eficiente la inteligencia colectiva.
La Web 3.0 puede ser clave para mejorar procesos de negocio, hay pero que identificar qué procesos serán beneficiados por este cambio de paradigma.
Los investigadores que se ocupan de procesos de negocio y administración de empresa desde ya unos años están estudiando los cambios que se están verificando en los departamentos de I+D de las grandes empresas (sobre todo) tecnológicas. Hasta finales de los '90 la politica era "busca un genio y dale una maleta de dinero esperando que salga algo bueno" (así se inventó el primer PC), ahora el departamento de I+D se abre a todos los empleados, a los clientes y a otras compañías. El paradigma ha sido bautizado Open Innovation (aquí y aquí teneis unas referencias).
La web 3.0 se propone con fuerza cómo filosofía y tecnología de soporte a la innovación abierta, ya punto de fuerza de empresas cómo IBM, GE o Cisco System. En la web encontramos ejemplos de portales abiertos a todos para colaborar a innovación de grandes organizaciones, cómo Next Open Innovation (de Telecom Italia), Innocentive (del gigante farmaceutico Eli Lili) o Bankinter Ideas.
Y otras compañías están desarrollando intranets para innovación abierta entre todos sus empleados...

Spanish

We’ve been working to get the dissertaions of our recent PhD graduates online. The latest one is Olga Ratsimor’s 2007 dissertation on bartering for goods and services in a mobile or pervasive environments. Here is the citation and abstract. You can click through on the title to get a pdf copy of the dissertation.

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Olga Vladi Ratsimor, Opportunistic Bartering of Digital Goods and Services in Pervasive Environments, Ph.D. Dissertation in Computer Science, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, August 2007.

The vision of mobile personal devices querying peers in their environment for information such as local restaurant recommendations or directions to the closest gas station, or traffic and weather updates has long been a goal of the pervasive research community. However, considering the diversity and the personal nature of devices participating in pervasive environments it is not feasible to assume that these interactions and collaborations will take place with out economically-driven motivating incentives.

This dissertation presents a novel bartering communication model that provides an underlying framework for incentives for collaborations in mobile pervasive environments by supporting opportunistic serendipitous peer-to-peer bartering for digital goods such as ring tones, MP3’s and podcasts.

To demonstrate viability and advantages of this innovative bartering approach, we compare and contrast the performances of two conventional, frequently employed, peer-to-peer interaction approaches namely Altruists and FreeRiders against two collaborative strategies that employ the Double Coincidence of Wants paradigm from the domain of barter exchanges. In particular, we present our communication framework that represents these collaborative strategies through a set of interaction policies that reflect these strategies. Furthermore, we present a set of results from our in-depth simulation studies that compare these strategies.

We examine the operation of the nodes employing our framework and executing these four distinct strategies and specifically, we compare the performances of the nodes executing these strategies in homogeneous and heterogeneous networks of mobile devices. We also examine the effects of adding InfoStations to these networks. For each of the strategies, we observe levels of gains and losses that nodes experience as result of collaborative digital good exchanges. We also evaluate communication overhead that nodes incur while looking for possible collaborative exchange. Furthermore, this dissertation offers an in-depth study of the swarm-like inter-strategy dynamics in heterogeneous networks populated with diverse nodes displaying varying levels of collaborative interaction attitudes. Further, the bartering framework is extended by incorporating value-sensitive bartering models that incorporate digital goods and content valuations into the bartering exchange process. In addition, the bartering model is extended by integration of socially influenced collaborative interaction that exploit role based social relationships between mobile peers that populate dynamic mobile environments.

Taken as a whole, the novel research work presented in this dissertation offers the first comprehensive effort that employs and models opportunistic bartering-based collaborative methodology in the context of serendipitous encounters in dynamic mobile peer-to-peer pervasive environments where mobile entities negotiate and exchange digital goods and content.

English

USA Today reports (Feds may mine blogs for terrorism clues) that the US Department of Homeland Security wants to use data-mining technology to search blogs and Internet message boards to find those used by terrorists to plan attacks.

“Blogging and message boards have played a substantial role in allowing communication among those who would do the United States harm,” DHS said in a recent notice.

Julian Sanchez notes on Ars Technica that the story is not new.

“The story is actually pegged to a Sources Sought Notice posted by the Department of Homeland Security back in October. Our colleagues at Wired reported on it at the time.”

English

Wenjia Li will present his dissertation proposal on ‘A Security Framework to Cope with Node Misbehaviors in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks’ which will be done under the supervision of Professor Anupam Joshi. The presentation will be at 4:00pm Tuesday, January 6, in ITE 325b. Here’s the abstract.

A Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork (MANET), as its name suggests, has no fixed infrastructure, and is generally composed of a dynamic set of cooperative peers, which are willing to share their wireless transmission power with other peers so that indirect communication can be possible between nodes that are not in the radio range of each other . The nature of MANETs, such as node mobility, unreliable transmission medium and restricted battery power, makes them extremely vulnerable to a variety of node misbehaviors. Wireless links, for instance, are generally prone to both passive eavesdropping and active intrusion. Another security concern in ad hoc networks is caused by the cooperative nature of the nodes. Attacks from external adversaries may disturb communications, but the external intruder generally cannot directly participate in the cooperative activities among the nodes, such as routing, because they do not possess the proper secure credentials, such as shared keys. However, compromised nodes, which are taken over by an adversary, are capable of presenting the proper secure credentials, and consequently can interfere with almost all of the network operations, such as route discovery, key management and distribution, and packet forwarding. Hence, it is essential to cope with node misbehaviors so as to secure mobile ad hoc networks.

In this dissertation, we address the question of how to ensure that a MANET will properly operate despite the presence of various node misbehaviors. We propose to build a framework that can cope with various node misbehaviors in a wise and adaptive manner. The main purpose of our proposed framework is to provide a platform so that the components that identify and respond to misbehaviors can better cooperate with each other and quickly adapt to the changes of network context. Therefore, policies are planned to be utilized in our framework in order to make those components correctly function in different network contexts. Besides the policy component, there are three other components, which fulfill the tasks of misbehavior detection, trust and reputation management, and route management, respectively. To validate and evaluate our proposed framework, we plan to implement our framework based on simulator.

In particular, the contributions of this dissertation are (i) Develop a framework to combine the functionalities of surveillance and detection of misbehavior, trust and reputation management, route management, and policy management so as to provide a high-level solution to cope with various misbehaviors in MANETs in an intelligent and adaptive manner (ii) Propose and implement a misbehavior detector based on the gossip-based outlier detection method, which relies on neither any pre-defined threshold nor any training data (iii) Take into account both first-hand information (direct observation) and second-hand information (indirect observation) during both misbehavior detection and trust management processes, in which first-hand information and second-hand information are merged by some intelligent methods (iv) Specify and enforce policies in the proposed framework, which makes the framework promptly adapt to the rapidly changing network context.

English

se trata de un proyecto desarrollado por investigadores Europeos, MOBVIS, que desarrolla un nuevo sistema que permitirá a los dispositivos móviles con captación de imágenes enlazar, hacer hipertextuales los datos (imágenes) del mundo real:

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Os dejo hoy algo así como la bola de cristal de lo que será la web en un futuro no demasiado lejano (ya sabéis…la Ley de Moore o evolución exponencial de algunas tecnologías), un nuevo adelanto en la Internet de las cosas, en la Ubicuidad de la web.

Presentábamos el otro día  CoMET, como la web 3.0 de las personas. En este caso, también se trata de un proyecto desarrollado por investigadores Europeos, MOBVIS, que desarrolla un nuevo sistema que permitirá a los dispositivos móviles con captación de imágenes enlazar, hacer hipertextuales los datos (imágenes) del mundo real:

Conciencia” sobre objetos, Visión artificial móvil:

La conciencia sobre objetos se utiliza para detectar y reconocer objetos de alto interés en escenarios urbanos, como edificios, infraestructura, gente y signos (logotipos, banners, etc…).  MOBVIS demuestra cómo la geo-indexación mejora notablemente el funcionamiento de objetos móviles mediante la explotación de la información de mapas de ciudades aumentados digitalmente. La consulta por imagen y la posición estimada basada en GPS llegan al servidor, que devuelve resultados de reconocimiento geo-indexado del objeto. Además, los visitantes pueden recibir información histórica, de eventos, tiendas, etc…sobre el punto de interés.

La novedad, con respecto a Google Street View está en el carácter de los datos que es capaz de interpretar. Mientras la primera identifica la localización via GPS o triangulación para mostrar a continuación imágenes de la zona, MOBVIS, “ve” el mundo a través de nuestros dispositivos móviles (”visión artificial móvil”).

No es la primera de las aplicaciones de la web semántica, la web que intenta interpretar el significado de los datos, que puede considerarse multiformato, mediante reconocimiento de patrones visuales, pero sí la que parece devolver resultados más espectaculares. Pensad un poco en ello, imaginad, aplicando también patrones visuales conocidos, cómo pueden configurar desarrollos como este nuestro futuro….

Tenéis en la página de MOBVIS posibles usos, escenarios de uso del sistema:

Hemos apuntado la localización urbana, información turística, mapas urbanos aumentados: La tecnología de MOBVIS puede servir para informar a los visitantes sobre objetos (sitios de interés, edificios), devolviendo información relevante.

La ilustración muestra una consulta de imagen (marco azul) y algunas imágenes de referencia (marco verde)  usadas para posicionar y orientar la búsqueda por imagen y en consecuencia, al usuario.

Existen relaciones geométricas relativas a la imagen de la consulta (marcadas por las líneas verde oscuro):

Localización visual, Posicionamiento multimodal, estimación de movimiento:

De modo similar a la tecnología GPS, MOBVIS puede determinar la localización de objetos en movimiento, así como su velocidad. Curiosamente, la visión por ordenador ha demostrado ser incuso más precisa que la localización GPS. Además, la localización basada en imágenes permite el hiperenlace a items reales o detección georeferencial de objetos. ¿La web semántica de la vida real?

Geo-Servicios y Actualización incremental del mapa (Crowdsourcing):
El sistema puede recoger actualizaciones de los mapas cuando los usuarios toman sus fotografías (no necesita las caravanas de Google por las calles, somos nosotros quienes la hacemos mejor). Sensores conectados a personas o vehículos se han encargado de registrar los datos con los que trabaja en la actualidad.

MOBVIS ha desarrollado un sistema de atención a partir de múltiples claves inspiradas en la atención humana y el movimiento de nuestros ojos. Además, la extracción de perfiles de recuperación de información 3D pude ser indexada en mapas de ciudades para obtener información (conciencia) sobre nuestra localización.

Resumiendo, podríamos decir que el sistema parte de una base de datos de panoramas geo-referenciados (como Google Street View). Los objetos en las imágenes se anotan de forma manual con información. Cuando se ha completado todo ello, el sistema es capaz de realizar búsquedas desde teléfonos móviles. A partir de las fotografías que podamos tomar, MOBVIS compara la fotografía con las que tiene en su base de datos para devolvernos enlaces relevantes.

Su punto fuerte es el algoritmo de chequeo de características visuales desarrollado por la Universidad de Ljubljana, en Eslovenia. Se trata de un sistema bastante preciso, capaz de distinguir entre objetos a partir de mínimas diferencias. En pruebas en el mundo real, parece que realizó inferencias correctas en el 80% de las ocasiones. En el 20% restante no devolvió resultados, no reportando en ningún caso falsos positivos.

Espectacular pero confuso, lo sé….suerte que he encontrado, para terminar, un vídeo desde la Universidad de Ljubljana al respecto:

Spanish

The amount of free, interesting, and useful data is growing explosively. Luckily, computer are getting cheaper as we speak, they are all connected with a robust communication infrastructure, and software for analyzing data is better than ever. That’s why everyone is interested in easy to use frameworks like MapReduce for every-day programmers to run their data crunching in parallel.

octo.py is a very simple MapReduce like system inspired by Ruby’s Starfish.

“Octo.py doesn’t aim to meet all your distributed computing needs, but its simple approach is amendable to a large proportion of parallelizable tasks. If your code has a for-loop, there’s a good chance that you can make it distributed with just a few small changes. If you’re already using Python’s map() and reduce() functions, the changes needed are trivial!”

triangular.py is the simple example given in the documentation that is used with octo.py to compute the first 100 triangular numbers.

# triangular.py compute first 100 triangular numbers. Do
# 'octo.py server triangular.py' on server with address IP
# and 'octo.py client IP' on each client. Server uses source
# & final, sends tasks to clients, integrates results. Clients
# get tasks from server, use mapfn & reducefn, return results.

source = dict(zip(range(100), range(100)))

def final(key, value):
    print key, value

def mapfn(key, value):
    for i in range(value + 1):
        yield key, i

def reducefn(key, value):
    return sum(value)

Put octo.py on all of the machines you want to use. On the machine you will use as a server (with ip address <ip>), also install triangular.py, and then execute:

     python octo.py server triangular.py &

On each of your clients, run

     python octo.py client <ip> &

You can try this out using the same machine to run the server process and one or more client processes, of course.

When the clients register with the server, they will get a copy of triangular.py and wait for tasks from the server. The server access the data from source and distributed tasks to the clients. These in turn use mapfn and reducefn to complete the tasks, returning the results. The server integrates these and, when all have completed, invokes final, which in this case just prints the answers, and halts. The clients continue to run, waiting for more tasks to do.

Octo.py is not a replacement for more sophisticated frameworks like Hadoop or Disco but if you are working in Python, its KISS approach is a good way to get started with the MapReduce paradigm and might be all you need for a small projects.

(Note: The package has not been updated since April 2008, so it’s status is not clear. But further development would run the risk of making it more complex and would be self-defeating.)

English

Empieza el año y toca cumplir promesas pasadas. Así, hablábamos hace unos días de la Web contextual y os citaba Ubiquity, una extensión actual de Firefox recientemente actualizada,  que ofrece tecnología contextual (semántica) mediante texto (lo que ellos denominan “verbos”) en una línea de comando. Llevo unos días probándolo y definitivamente vale la pena.

Estos serían sus fundamentos:

Las aplicaciones web, como muchas de las de escritorio, parecen en ocasiones ciudades aisladas, sin demasiadas posibilidades para el intercambio de información Es un tema que intentan solucionar para la web algunas extensiones para Firefox: botones de marcado social o complementos como Greasemonkey irían en ese sentido.

Serían estos “puentes” entre ciudades más o menos abiertas (según el carácter de sus APIs) elementos imprescindibles para la web contextual o el GGG (Grafo Global Gigante) del que nos hablaba Berners-Lee y que supone la próxima etapa de la web. Extraigo de un post anterior:

“El GGG (Giant Global Graph, Grafo Global Gigante), viene a superar el Grafo social (la web 3.0 viene a superar la 2.0….) y describe la web del futuro:

Más allá de articular relaciones entre personas, la web tratará de unir personas a lugares, lugares a organizaciones, relacionar personas y lugares, documentos y personas, con los eventos y todas las variantes que puedan surgir de estos conceptos clave.”

Cada vez son más esos puentes. Podemos con Ubiquity, desde añadir eventos de forma simple a Google Calendar, añadir marcadores a Twine, Ping-fm a convertir selecciones a pdf, rtf o html, pasando por definir, traducir, localizar en Google Maps, convertir enlaces a tinyURLs, etc…(tenéis en el punto 3 recursos sobre listados)

Veámos cómo ponerlo a prueba:

1-Encontraremos el enlace a la descarga de Ubiquity aquí.

2-Una vez descargado y reiniciado Firefox (proceso usual para instalar cualquier extensión en este navegador), invocaremos, llamaremos a la interface, línea de comando o ventana desde la que interactuar con Ubuiquity. Las teclas predeterminadas para ello serán Ctrl y espacio pulsados de forma simultánea (ctrl-space para PCs, ‘option-space’ en el caso de Mac)

3-De lo que se trata ahora es de explorar los comandos (verbos) que nos serán más útiles. Podemos encontrar listados de los mismos, tanto en la página principal de Ubiquity (deberemos marcar, personalizar los que vayamos a utilizar desde aquí) como en algunos interesantes listados, entre los que destacaría el de RWW: Verbos instalables en Ubiquity .

Como ejemplo, os recomiendo probar un “update” en twitter. Tras invocar la línea de comando (mediante ctrl-space) y haber marcado la opción correspondiente, escribiremos los siguiente:

twitter [probando Ubiquity]

El listado completo de comandos es un comando más. Aparecerá si escribimos, siguiendo los pasos anteriores: command-list

Os dejo un vídeo que explica muy bien su funcionamiento:

Comentar para terminar que es muy probable que en este caso, la extensión forme parte de la próxima versión de Firefox. Lo comentábamos al hablar sobre web contextual y la evolución, tanto de IExplore como del propio Firefox en este sentido. Además, deciros que acaba de salir una nueva versión, mucho más rápida y con la posibilidad de usar distitntos “skins”.

Herramientas relacionadas:

• Mashlogic, extensión para firefox que mejora la experiencia en la web

Spanish

We'd like to thank each and every one of you for contributing to the success of Calais over the last year. From an idea in mid-2007 to our launch in January 2008, it's been an amazing ride.

We're wrapping up the year with 9,000 registered users of the Calais service who are submitting one to two million transactions each day. You've built dozens, if not hundreds, of innovative applications and you've provided regular feedback to help us make the service more useful. Thank you. We truly could not have done it without you.

Now we'd like to ask for a little more help. We're pulling together our roadmap for 2009 and want to hear directly from you about what you'd like to see. As a user-driven project, Calais needs your feedback to make sure we're on the right path.

Please drop us a note at 2009@opencalais.com and let us know two things:

First: What would you like to see delivered in 2009? New extractions? Languages? New tools or API capabilities? Integration with your favorite content management system? Let us know - nothing is off the table.

Second: How are you using Calais? Even if it's experimental and not for public consumption, we'd love to hear what you're up to - or even what you're thinking about.

Again, thanks for your support. There are some exciting announcements coming with Release 4 of Calais in mid-January and we're looking forward to a great 2009. Your input will help make it so.

Our best wishes for happy and healthy new year,

The Calais Team

English

The submission deadline for the Third International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media is just three weeks away. To inspire yourself to work on a submission, you can check out videos from the 2008 ICWSM which are online at Videolectures.net. Here are highlights.

• Best paper: Travis Kriplean, Ivan Beschastnikh, David McDonald, Wikipedian Self-Governance in Action: Motivating the Policy Lens
• Invited talk: Brad Fitzpatrick, Decentralization and Interop: past, present, future
• Invited talk: David Sifry, Scaling Innovation in a Network Effect World
• Invited talk: Marc Smith, Social dimension of social media
• Tutorial: Mary McGlohon, Graph Mining Techniques for Social Media Analysis
• Tutorial: Jan Wiebe, Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis
• James Caverlee, A Large-Scale Study of MySpace: Observations and Implications for Online Social Networks
• Aaditeshwar Seth, Jie Zhang, A Social Network Based Approach to Personalized Recommendation of Participatory Media Content
• Michael Gamon, Danyel Fisher, Sumit Basu, Dmitriy Belenko, Matthew Hurst, Arnd Christian König, BLEWS: Using Blogs to Provide Context for News Articles
• Jiang Yang, Lada Adamic, Mark Ackerman : Competing to Share Expertise: the Taskcn Knowledge Sharing Community
• Jaime Arguello, Jonathan Elsas, Jamie Callan, Jaime Carbonel : Document Representation and Query Expansion Models for Blog Recommendation
• Noor Ali-Hasan, Exploring Social Media Scenarios for the Television
• Hikaru Yamamoto, Naohiro Matsumura, Daisuke Tomozawa, Finding Influencers and Consumer Insights in the Blogosphere
• Mikhail Bautin, Lohit Vijayarenu, Steven Skiena, International Sentiment Analysis for News and Blogs
• Ramesh Nallapati, William Cohen, Link-PLSA-LDA: A new unsupervised model for topics and influence of blogs
• Ian Soboroff, On TREC Blog Track
• Jason Kessler, Polling the Blogosphere: a Rule-Based Approach to Belief Classification
• Yi-Chia Wang, William Cohen, Mahesh Joshi, Carolyn Rosé : Recovering Implicit Thread Structure in Newsgroup Style Conversations
• Danyel Fisher, Marc Smith, Tammara Combs Turner, Space Planning for Online Community
• Kristin Stecher, Scott Counts, Spontaneous Inference of Personality Traits from Online Profiles
• Gina Walejko, Thomas Ksiazek, The Politics of Sourcing: A Study of Journalistic Practices in the Blogosphere
• Nairan Ramírez-Esparza, Cindy Chung, Ewa Kacewicz, James W. Pennebaker, The Psychology of Word Use in Depression Forums in English and in Spanish
• Kristin Stecher, Scott Counts, Thin Slices of Online Profile Attributes
• David Evans, Sam Gosling, Anthony Carroll, What Elements of an Online Social Networking Profile Predict Target-Rater Agreement in Personality?
• Zareen Syed, Wikipedia as an Ontology for Describing Documents

English

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Congratulations to the UMBC Chess team and their advisor and our colleague, UMBC CSEE Professor Alan Sherman, for a first place tie in the 54th Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship.

UMBC tied for first place with University of Texas at Dallas (B Team) in the sixth and final round of the three-day 2008 Pan-Am Championship which was held in Dallas. This year 29 four-person college teams competed in the annual event which is known as the “World Series of College Chess“. UMBC has now won the Pan-Am tournament a record eight times. The final standings are available at swchess.

The two first place winners will meet again with the third and fourth place teams, the University of Texas Brownville and Stanford, in the special Final Four of Chess tournament, which is held in spring 2009.

The UMBC chess team: front row, L to R: WGM Sabina Foisor, GM Timur Gareev, GM Sergey Erenburg, and GM Leonid Kritz, board one, Back row: UMBC coaches GM Sam Palantnik and NM Igor Epshteyn. Photo Alexey Root.

English

Wikirage is yet another way to track what’s happening in the world via changes in social media, in this case, Wikipedia. As the site suggests, “popular people in the news, the latest fads, and the hottest video games can be quickly identified by monitoring this social phenomenon.”

Wikirage lists the 100 Wikipedia pages that are being heavily edited over any of six time periods from the last hour to the last month. You can see the top 100 by your choice of six metrics: number of quality edits, unique editors, total edits, vandalism, reversions, or undos. Clicking on a result shows a monthly summary for the article, for example, December 2008 Gaza Strip airstrikes, which is at the top of today’s list for number of edits as I write. I understand the Gaza article, but what’s up with the Tasmanian tiger?

The interface has some other nice features, such as marking pages in red that have high revision, vandalism or undo rates and showing associated Wikipedia flags that indicating articles that need attention or don’t live up to standards. Wikirage is also available for the English, Japanese, Spanish, German and French language Wikipedias.

Wikirage was developed by Craig Wood and is a nicely done system.

(via the Porn Sex Viagra Casino Spam site)

English

Akshay Java defended his PhD dissertation this fall on discovering communities in social media systems and the submitted version is now available online. Akshay is now a scientist at Microsoft’s Live Labs. The citation, link and abstract are below.

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Akshay Java, Mining Social Media Communities and Content, Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, December 1, 2008. Available at http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/paper/html/id/429/Mining-Social-Media-Communities-and-Content.

Social Media is changing the way people find information, share knowledge and communicate with each other. The important factor contributing to the growth of these technologies is the ability to easily produce “user-generated content”. Blogs, Twitter, Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube are just a few examples of Web 2.0 tools that are drastically changing the Internet landscape today. These platforms allow users to produce and annotate content and more importantly, empower them to share information with their social network. Friends can in turn, comment and interact with the producer of the original content and also with each other. Such social interactions foster communities in online, social media systems. User-generated content and the social graph are thus the two essential elements of any social media system.

Given the vast amount of user-generated content being produced each day and the easy access to the social graph, how can we analyze the structure and content of social media data to understand the nature of online communication and collaboration in social applications? This thesis presents a systematic study of the social media landscape through the combined analysis of its special properties, structure and content.

First, we have developed a framework for analyzing social media content effectively. The BlogVox opinion retrieval system is a large scale blog indexing and content analysis engine. For a given query term, the system retrieves and ranks blog posts expressing sentiments (either positive or negative) towards the query terms. Further, we have developed a framework to index and semantically analyze syndicated1 feeds from news websites. We use a sophisticated natural language processing system, OntoSem, to semantically analyze news stories and build a rich fact repository of knowledge extracted from real-time feeds. It enables other applications to benefit from such deep semantic analysis by exporting the text meaning representations in Semantic Web language, OWL.

Secondly, we describe novel algorithms that utilize the special structure and properties of social graphs to detect communities in social media. Communities are an essential element of social media systems and detecting their structure and membership is critical in several real-world applications. Many algorithms for community detection are computationally expensive and generally, do not scale well for large networks. In this work we present an approach that benefits from the scale-free distribution of node degrees to extract communities efficiently. Social media sites frequently allow users to provide additional meta-data about the shared resources, usually in the form of tags or folksonomies. We have developed a new community detection algorithm that can combine information from tags and the structural information obtained from the graphs to effectively detect communities. We demonstrate how structure and content analysis in social media can benefit from the availability of rich meta-data and special properties.

Finally, we study social media systems from the user perspective. In the first study we present an analysis of how a large population of users subscribes and organizes the blog feeds that they read. This study has revealed interesting properties and characteristics of the way we consume information. We are the first to present an approach to what is now known as the “feed distillation” task, which involves finding relevant feeds for a given query term. Based on our understanding of feed subscription patterns we have built a prototype system that provides recommendations for new feeds to subscribe and measures the readership based influence of blogs in different topics.

We are also the first to measure the usage and nature of communities in a relatively new phenomena called Microblogging. Microblogging is a new form of communication in which users can describe their current status in short posts distributed by instant messages, mobile phones, email or the Web. In this study, we present our observations of the microblogging phenomena and user intentions by studying the content, topological and geographical properties of such communities. We find that microblogging provides users with a more immediate form of communication to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information.

The course of this research has highlighted several challenges that processing social media data presents. This class of problems requires us to re-think our approach to text mining, community and graph analysis. Comprehensive understanding of social media systems allows us to validate theories from social sciences and psychology, but on a scale much larger than ever imagined. Ultimately this leads to a better understanding of how we communicate and interact with each other today and in future.

English

The NYT has an article, What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting , about new interest in understanding why charges for SMS service has been increasing even while volume is up and communication costs are down.

I learned one interesting thing from the article about the length of SMS messages. I’d never thought much about where the limit on the number of characters came from. According to the article, the limit is 160 (7 bit) characters because that’s what will fit into the control channel messages that mobile phones exchange with cell towers.

“The lucrative nature of that revenue increase cannot be appreciated without doing something that T-Mobile chose not to do, which is to talk about whether its costs rose as the industry’s messaging volume grew tenfold. Mr. Kohl’s letter of inquiry noted that “text messaging files are very small, as the size of text messages are generally limited to 160 characters per message, and therefore cost carriers very little to transmit.” A better description might be “cost carriers very, very, very little to transmit.”

A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset. In the wired portion of its journey, a file of such infinitesimal size is inconsequential. Srinivasan Keshav, a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, said: “Messages are small. Even though a trillion seems like a lot to carry, it isn’t.”

Perhaps the costs for the wireless portion at either end are high — spectrum is finite, after all, and carriers pay dearly for the rights to use it. But text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network. That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.”

There’s a lot more to the protocols, of course. The Wikipedia SMS article looks like a good place to start.

English

The NYT has an article, What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting , about new interest in understanding why charges for SMS service has been increasing even while volume is up and communication costs are down.

I learned one interesting thing from the article about the length of SMS messages. I’d never thought much about where the limit on the number of characters came from. According to the article, the limit is 160 (7 bit) characters because that’s what will fit into the control channel messages that mobile phones exchange with cell towers.

“The lucrative nature of that revenue increase cannot be appreciated without doing something that T-Mobile chose not to do, which is to talk about whether its costs rose as the industry’s messaging volume grew tenfold. Mr. Kohl’s letter of inquiry noted that “text messaging files are very small, as the size of text messages are generally limited to 160 characters per message, and therefore cost carriers very little to transmit.” A better description might be “cost carriers very, very, very little to transmit.”

A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset. In the wired portion of its journey, a file of such infinitesimal size is inconsequential. Srinivasan Keshav, a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, said: “Messages are small. Even though a trillion seems like a lot to carry, it isn’t.”

Perhaps the costs for the wireless portion at either end are high — spectrum is finite, after all, and carriers pay dearly for the rights to use it. But text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network. That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.”

There’s a lot more to the protocols, of course. The Wikipedia SMS article looks like a good place to start.

English

Yongmei Shi defended her PhD dissertation earlier this fall on using syntactic and semantic information to detect errors in spoken language systems under the direction of Dr. R. Scott Cost (JHU/APL) and Professor Lina Zhou (UMBC). Her dissertation has been submitted an is now available online.

Yongmei Shi, An Investigation of Linguistic Information for Speech Recognition Error Detection, Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, October 2008.

After several decades of effort, signi?cant progress has been made in the area of speech recognition technologies, and various speech-based applications have been developed. However, current speech recognition systems still generate erroneous output, which hinders the wide adoption of speech applications. Given that the goal of error-free output can not be realized in near future, mechanisms for automatically detecting and even correcting speech recognition errors may prove useful for amending imperfect speech recognition systems. This dissertation research focuses on the automatic detection of speech recognition errors for monologue applications, and in particular, dictation applications.

Due to computational complexity and ef?ciency concerns, limited linguistic information is embedded in speech recognition systems. Furthermore, when identifying speech recognition errors, humans always apply linguistic knowledge to complete the task. This dissertation therefore investigates the effect of linguistic information on automatic error detection by applying two levels of linguistic analysis, speci?cally syntactic analysis and semantic analysis, to the post processing of speech recognition output. Experiments are conducted on two dictation corpora which differ in both topic and style (daily of?ce communication by students and Wall Street Journal news by journalists).

To catch grammatical abnormalities possibly caused by speech recognition errors, two sets of syntactic features, linkage information and word associations based on syntactic dependency, are extracted for each word from the output of two lexicalized robust syntactic parsers respectively. Con?dence measures, which combine features using Support Vector Machines, are used to detect speech recognition errors. A con?dence measure that combines syntactic features with non-linguistic features yields consistent performance improvement in one or more aspects over those obtained by using non-linguistic features alone.

Semantic abnormalities possibly caused by speech recognition errors are caught by the analysis of semantic relatedness of a word to its context. Two different methods are used to integrate semantic analysis with syntactic analysis. One approach addresses the problem by extracting features for each word from its relations to other words. To this end, various WordNet-based measures and different context lengths are examined. The addition of semantic features in con?dence measures can further yield small but consistent improvement in error detection performance. The other approach applies lexical cohesion analysis by taking both reiteration and collocation relationships into consideration and by augmenting words with probability predicted from syntactic analysis. Two WordNet-based measures and one measure based on Latent Semantic Analysis are used to instantiate lexical cohesion relationships. Additionally, various word probability thresholds and cosine similarity thresholds are examined. The incorporation of lexical cohesion analysis is superior to the use of syntactic analysis alone. In summary, the use of linguistic information as described, including syntactic and semantic information, can provide positive impact on automatic detection of speech recognition errors.

English

Decíamos al final del artículo sobre tendencias en la web para 2009 que se aventura un futuro en el que el objetivo será combatir la sobreinformación, que a pesar de la progresión creciente en nuestras habilidades cognitivas para procesarla adecuadamente, nos llevará a ser mucho más selectivos, a filtrar bajo criterios sociales o (otra vez) semánticos, cada vez más y con herramientas más eficientes, nuestras fuentes de información en la red

La idea es poderosa y parece ir un paso  más allá de los estrictos criterios que parece exigir cualquier aplicación para poder ser considerada semántica: La web contextual pretenderá que navegadores y páginas reconozcan con mayor precisión lo que el usuario realmente quiere encontrar. Menos opciones y más significado, menos búsquedas en Google y más contexto, persiguiendo las siguiente mejoras en la experiencia de usuario:

• Relevancia: entender mejor el contexto conlleva mayor relevancia de los contenidos para el usuario.
• Eficiencia - Atajos: Los atajos contextuales facilitarían las búsquedas.
• Personalización: El contexto está basado en las intenciones y la historia de navegación del usuario.
• Remezcla - Mashups: en entornos abiertos, puede devolvernos información relevante e interoperable entre servicios de la web (Ubiquity puede insertar un mapa en un correo electrónico de forma muy fácil).

Este  tipo de tecnologías contextuales tienen en muchas ocasiones como base lenguajes propios de la web semántica. Se basan también en la filosofía de las APIs abiertas (que permiten la interacción entre distintas aplicaciones de la web).

El html plano, sin marcas semánticas, xml, rdf o microformatos, entre otros lenguajes de marcado semántico (metadatos), no permitía la interacción con el navegador a los niveles actuales. Hoy, cuando el navegador puede inferir ideas acerca de las páginas que visitamos, es capaz de devolvernos información relativa y/o relevante.

Tal y como decíamos al hablar de la web semántica, la web contextual entiende  mayor medida el comportamiento del usuario. La combinación de la información sobre la página con el comportamiento del usuario es lo que crea el contexto y por tanto, una web más inteligente.

No creo que como afirma Alex Iskold, de quien extraigo algunas de las  ideas en este post, la web contextual vaya a sobrepasar, a superar en cuanto a su frecuencia de uso, la costumbre de hoy de aproximarnos a la información a partir de resultados en el buscador. No en un primer momento, desde la premisa lógica de que no hay contexto sin información previa (información+comportamiento=contexto) y por tanto la primera aproximación a lo que buscamos deberá pasar casi siempre por buscadores, pero sí después, evitándonos muchos clicks innecesarios  y haciendo por tanto mucho más eficiente nuestra navegación posterior.

Creo, además, más allá de la idea original, que el tema debe incluir algunas cosas más, que también deben ser consideradas contextuales:

-La geolocalización, o oferta de contenidos según el lugar desde el que esté físicamente el usuario

-Los contenidos de relevancia “social”, aquellos que preferimos porque son los que prefieren nuestros contactos en redes sociales.

-También aprendería de nuestro comportamiento como usuarios, evitándo que nos encontremos una y otra vez con resultados que consideramos irrelevantes (Google está poniendo en práctica ya un sistema de filtrado de resultados personalizados según nuestras valoraciones previas, Google SearchWiki)

Una de las formas de aportar metadatos a las páginas que escribimos son los microformatos:

Presento siempre los microformatos como precursores, de fácil comprensión, de la web semántica.  Ofrecen una forma compatible con los estándares XHTML de embeber metadatos sobre diversas cosas, diciéndole al navegador que son gente, lugares, eventos, revisiones, etc…

Los Web Slices, introducidos por Internet Explorer 8, por ejemplo, entienden el microformato hAtom. Los Web Slices permiten a los que publicamos contenidos notificar a los usuarios de IE8 cualquier cambio en la información de nuestras páginas web. Weather.com podría, por ejemplo, crear un Web Slice que que notificara al usuario cualquier actualización en el clima local. El concepto es similar a lo que hacen los sistemas de sindicación de contenidos (feeds), pero de forma más focalizada en partes de la página y permitiendo al usuario la interacción con el sitio de forma directa, a través del navegador en la página.

XML realiza, en aplicaciones como Cooliris, un trabajo similar, señalando al navegador si una página contiene o no imágenes para que el visitante pueda verlas en 3D. AdaptiveBlue trabaja la web contextual mediante ABMeta, formato que permite anotar páginas que contienen información sobre libros, música, películas, productos, restaurantes, etc…

Todas estas aproximaciones se basan en el marcado de las páginas. Y a pesar de que algunos, preocupados por la web semántica, dedican tiempo a hacerlo, la mayoría de las páginas siguen estando escritas en HTML plano.

La web contextual en navegadores

Tanto Internet Explorer como Firefox, han incorporado potencialidades de la experiencia contextual, mediante distintos tipos de atajo: Internet Explorer 8 incorpora una nueva tecnología al respecto con sus Accelerators.

Según Microsoft, Accelerators ofrece acceso a servicios online comunes, desde cualquier página que visitemos. Son pequeños trozos de variables predefinidas en XML por el propio navegador: la URL activa, el dominio activo y el texto seleccionado. La acción más común de Accelerator es la búsqueda de información contextual en base a las selecciones del usuario. Otor ejemplo típico es la búsqueda de mapas a partir de direcciones.

No se trata, en ese caso, de semántica. Los accelerators resultan aún pesados de manejar y requieren bastante tiempo e intervención del usuario. Firefox mejora el tema, con una aproximación basada en menús, ofreciendo la tecnología contextual mediante texto. Su extensión es Ubiquity, hoy sólo una extensión pero muy posiblemente característica crucial en próximas actualizaciones.

He estado probándolo esta tarde y la veremos con mayor profundidad en un próximo post, pero resumiendo, podríamos decir que devuelve mashups generados por el usuario, basándose en el lenguaje. Funciona de forma similar a los accelerators: el usuario puede seleccionar un fragmento de texto, invocar Ubiquity y escribir un comando. Existen cientos de ellos ya implementados.

Veremos en la segunda parte de esta entrada los Widgets para blogs y complementos para navegadores (Firefox). En fin…que ya os debo dos entradas

¿Os he deseado ya Feliz Navidad?

Spanish

JD Lasica’s SocialMedia.biz blog has a post, 2009 conferences: Social media, tech, marketing, that lists “some of the best social media, technology, media and marketing conferences for the upcoming year” in the US. The list doesn’t include any technology research-oriented conferences, but does have quite a range of others. The post invites everyone to suggest additional entries by adding comments about them. (I suggested ICWSM and the AAAI Spring Symposium on the Social Semantic Web.)

This list complements Akshay Java’s Social Media Events calendar which is focused mostly on research conferences. He also invites suggestions which you can submit by email or through comments.

English

It’s popular to ask “What Would Google Do” these days — The Google reports over 7,000 results for the phrase. Of course, it’s not just about Google, which we all use as the archetype for a new Web way of building and thinking about information systems. Asking WWGD can be productive, but only if we know how to implement and exploit the insights the answer gives us. This in turn requires us (well, some of us, anyway) to understand the algorithms, techniques, and software technology that Google and other large scale Web-oriented companies use. We need to ask “How Would Google Do It”.

Michael Nielsen has a nice post on using your laptop to compute PageRank for millions of webpages. His posts reviews PageRank and how to compute it and shows a short, but reasonably efficient, Python program that can easily do a graph with a few million nodes. While not sufficient for many applications, like the Web, there are lots of interesting and significant graphs this small Python program can handle — Wikipedia pages, DBLP publications, RDF namespaces, BGP routers, Twitter followers, etc.

The post is part of a series Nielsen is making on the Google Technology Stack including PageRank, MapReduce, BigTable, and GFS. The posts are a byproduct of a series of weekly lectures he’s giving starting earlier this month in Waterloo. Here’s the way that Nielsen describes the series.

“Part of what makes Google such an amazing engine of innovation is their internal technology stack: a set of powerful proprietary technologies that makes it easy for Google developers to generate and process enormous quantities of data. According to a senior Microsoft developer who moved to Google, Googlers work and think at a higher level of abstraction than do developers at many other companies, including Microsoft: “Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the if statement” (Credit: Joel Spolsky). This series of posts describes some of the technologies that make this high level of abstraction possible.”

Videos of the first two lectures, Introducion to PageRank and Building our PageRank Intuition) are available online. Nielsen illustrates the concepts and algorithms with well-written Python code and provides exercises to help readers master the material as well as “more challenging and often open-ended problems” which he has worked on but not completely solved.

Nielsen was trained as a as a theoretical Physicist but has shifted his attention to “the development of new tools for scientific collaboration and publication”. As far as I can see, he is offering these as free public lectures out of a desire to share his knowledge and also to help (or maybe force) him to deepen his own understanding of the topics and develop better ways of explaining them. In both cases, it an admirable and inspiring example for us all and appropriate for the holiday season. Merry Christmas!

English

Llegaron las recomendaciones navideñas a El caparazón. Estos son algunos de los sitios que creo que merecen una visita esta semana. En algunos casos son muy especiales para mi, así que tratádmelos bien

Reflexiones e irreflexiones - Por qué no enlazamos? Los datos que nos presenta Fernando dan que pensar, y mucho, sobre la cultura picaresca del país. Casi los últimos en el noble ejercicio del enlace.
Entre psicologos - Grupo de psicología para comentar casos clínicos, dudas de psicología y terapias afines: Como tributo a mi vocación perdida, participé en la idea de esta comunidad para psicólogos creada en Ning, Aclarar dudas de casos clínicos (diagnóstico, tratamiento…), en definitiva, ayudar en la práctica profesional, muchas veces solitaria de los terapeutas.
PASAPALABRA ONLINE: Uno de mis vicios favoritos, ahora online. Para desconectar un poco….
Multimèdia a eTT: Espacio de exposición de los trabajos en vídeo y flash de Teresa Julià, una compañera de estudios en la UOC de hace un tiempo. Estoy segura de que la felicitación navideña en flash de este año os alegrará un poco el momento.

VideoLectures.net acerca de la web semántica: Más de 90 Vídeos de alta calidad y ponencias desde la séptima conferencia internacional de Web Semántica.

Spanish

Before entering the holidays, one may wish that the news we get everyday were somehow customized to our interests. For example, “I am not really interested in Baseball, or I like Jazz news to appear in my first glance view, or I need to monitor emerging progress about synthetic insulin, or…” People can have variety of first-grade interests, but they have to collect these information from different places everyday, or through clicking bunch of links. Why not have my own newspaper where every column is about my selected interest, laid out in the way I want?

We built my.hakia.com, which does exactly what is described above. A screenshot is shown below.

The screenshot above tells the whole story except one important differentiator.

Semantic technology of hakia allows high-level of precision compared to any other similar platform. This enables the user to park highly specific questions against the emerging news. Therefore, my.hakia.com can be considered as “intelligence gathering dashboard”. Let us tell you how.

If you search Google news for Obama’s strategy for the new team, you will see that the results are mostly irrelevant. Try to create a Google alert for this query and see the results for yourself on a continuous basis.

The same search at hakia for Obama’s strategy for the new team produces dead-on results. This is because semantic technology does not need “link referrals” to pull relevant results unlike Google-esque search engines. For dynamic content like news, there is no time to collect “Link-referral” statistics and that is why Google-esque search engines fail beyond simple triggers. Try the same query at Yahoo, it displays the same confusion.

This fundamental differentiation is a valuable asset for my.hakia.com users because they will be getting precise results for specific interests that they cannot get it anywhere else. Some ideal cases are outlined below;

- Monitor your business competitors
- Get information on latest progress in the treatment of diseases
- Keep an eye on your favorite artists by activity (like album releases)
- Stay in touch with particular economic developments (such as in real estate in your city)

Try my.hakia.com, and tell us if we have met your expectations.

Happy holidays

English

High quality videos of tutorials and talks from the Seventh International Semantic Web Conference are now available on the excellent VideoLectures.net site. It’s a great opportunity to benefit from the conference if you were not able to attend or, even if you were, to see presentations you were not able to attend.

Videolectures captured the slides for most of the presentations (which are available for downloading) and their site shows both the the speaker’s video and slides in synchronization. Videolectures used three camera crews in parallel so were able to capture almost all of the presentations. Here are some highlights from the ~90 videos to whet your appetite.

• Introduction to the Semantic Web: An all-day tutorial featuring ten top researchers covering all aspects of the Semantic Web.
• How to Publish Linked Data on the Web: A three-hour tutorial by five researchers explaining how LOD works and how you can exploit it.
• Freebase: An Open, Writable Database of the World’s Information: A keynote by MetaWeb CTO John Giannandrea on Freebase.
• Semantic Web Challenge & Billion Triple Challenge: The session on the Semantic Web Challenge finalists.
• Semantic Wikis: Fusing the two strands of the Semantic Web: Mark Greaves on Semantic Wikis.
• Requirements Critic: A Tool for Automatically Analyzing Software Requirements Documents: The winner of the best paper award for the In Use track.
• Laconic and Precise Justifications in OWL: Winner of the best paper award for the Research Track.
• An OWL 2 Far?: A panel that takes up the question of whether having standard languages based on formal methods with steadily increasing power is the right way to support the Semantic Web.

English

La evolución de la web en 2009 será hacia la personalización, hacia hacer de la experiencia en la web algo mucho más real (”Web real world”), adaptado a nuestras necesidades, menos desconectado (servicios web auxiliando necesidades offline como la geolocalización, la web móvil, etc…) y por tanto, mucho más satisfactorio para el usuario final.

delicious

Tom Briggs defended his PhD dissertation last month on discovering domain and range constraints in OWL and the final copy is now available.

Thomas H. Briggs, Constraint Generation and Reasoning in OWL, 2008.

The majority of OWL ontologies in the emerging SemanticWeb are constructed from properties that lack domain and range constraints. Constraints in OWL are different from the familiar uses in programming languages and databases. They are actually type assertions that are made about the individualswhich are connected by the property. Because they are type assertions these assertions can add vital information to the individuals involved and give information on how the defining property may be used. Three different automated generation techniques are explored in this research: disjunction, least-common named subsumer, and vivification. Each algorithm is compared for the ability to generalize, and the performance impacts with respect to the reasoner. A large sample of ontologies from the Swoogle repository are used to compare real-world performance of these techniques. Using generated facts is a type of default reasoning. This may conflict with future assertions to the knowledge base. While general default reasoning is non-monotonic and undecidable a novel approach is introduced to support efficient contraction of the default knowledge. Constraint generation and default reasoning, together, enable a robust and efficient generation of domain and range constraints which will result in the inference of additional facts and improved performance for a number of Semantic Web applications.

English

Este es un post necesario, elaborado y obligado en esta época del año. Coincide en esta ocasión y a partir de la colaboración iniciada con la Asociación DIM-Espiral en su publicación periódica, en concreto, su sección sobre Últimas tendencias en la red.

Deriva del artículo publicado en el número 11 de la revista digital BITS-Espiral, que contiene material interesante, del que destacaría una entrevista al Director de Google España a la que podéis acceder en vídeo desde el enlace.

Agradecer desde aquí a Juanmi Muñoz y Irene Pelegrí, su directora, su trabajo en la publicación.

Agradeceros a todos la importante evolución de este blog, de la que sois los responsables más directos. FELIZ, muy FELIZ 2009.

Espero que disculpéis la extensión de esta entrada y entendáis que es mucho, tanto lo que pasó, como lo que está por llegar a este nuevo mundo.

• 2008, La socialización de la red hispana.

Año frenético de noticias, de desarrollo imparable de la web social. Más, como preveíamos en Tendencias para 2008, en el caso del ámbito hispano.

Redes sociales y otros servicios como Facebook, Reddit (agregador de noticias) o últimamente Friendfeed (lifestreaming) se lanzaban y lograban conquistar con éxito, sobretodo en el caso de la primera, nuestro mercado.

El protagonista absoluto del año 2008 hispanohablante, siguiendo el ejemplo ya mítico de Wired, hemos sido los usuarios.

Nosotros, nuestra creciente destreza, capacidad y voluntad de compartir en un campo abonado han dejado un ecosistema cada día más rico en contenidos.

Resultan innumerables los servicios nuevos o clones de los ya existentes (como Yahoobuzz, alternativa a Digg o las distintas versiones de Twitter) que han surgido en 2008, con anécdotas significativas como la que acercó Google a las calles de nuestras ciudades o el importante papel de la red en las elecciones norteamericanas (menos en las españolas), que han completado el panorama.

A la vez, diversas aplicaciones se mostraban en rebeldía, prometiéndonos un futuro, o por lo menos, una experiencia de usuario mejor en la prometedora web 3.0: Los Navegadores 3D que nos proporcionan mayor inmersión en imágenes o textos, desarrollos en la Internet de las cosas o las aplicaciones de la web semántica, entre las que Twine, la primera red social y de contenidos que trabaja internamente con algoritmos semánticos, Zemanta, una aplicación que enriquece los contenidos que generamos, o los desarrollos en el ámbito del etiquetado semántico de Calais, ocupan, en mi opinión, un lugar privilegiado.

Sobre herramientas que han evolucionado, creo que el ejemplo estrella es, una vez más, Twitter, que para muchos era un boom momentáneo y se convierte ya casi en imprescindible en la nueva web.

• 2008, los blogs como nuevas e indispensables herramientas de comunicación:

En cuanto a los blogs, más que morir seguían creciendo, mejorando su calidad, ampliando sus funciones desde la bitácora personal al periodismo ciudadano. Un dato importante nos lo confirma justo antes de cerrar este artículo:

El uso de internet por los 100 periódicos principales en EEUU cambió radicalmente en 2008. Según el informe anual de la industria, un 58% de estos medios digitales consultan y utilizan fuentes de contenido generado por los usuarios (User Generated Content) frente al 27% que lo hacía en 2007.

Una muestra más de que todo se amplía, se define, se actualiza, en mi opinión más como moda que con convencimiento, en 2008: Educación, Política, Administración, Márketing…se apellidan ya con  la coletilla imprescindible del año en la internet hispana: el “meme” 2.0.

• 2009, nuevos portales, APIs abiertas:

Especialización…, propuestas cada vez más elaboradas  de nuevos portales que lleven hasta sus últimas consecuencias la filosofía, la cultura de las APIs abiertas, como apuestas por el desarrollo de la Inteligencia colectiva, que parece que, a nivel mainstream (de uso masivo) podría ser una utopía protagonizada, en poco tiempo y si no viene Microsoft a terminar o completar la historia a través de una compra final muy, muy previsible, Yahoo:

Así, el portal en 2009 propuesto por Yahoo, modelo que seguirán, con toda probabilidad muchos otros (AOL, por ejemplo), será un agregado de widgets y aplicaciones de terceros (video de Netflix, música de iTunes, productos de Amazon…). La filosofía de las APIs abiertas de  Facebook, pero otorgando mayor importancia a cada marca y sobretodo,  fuera de los “jardines vallados” propios de la misma.

• 2009, identidades únicas, gestión del caos en las redes sociales:

Contribuye a este escenario, también,  el desarrollo de Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect y demás herramientas que intentarán librarnos de la sobreinformación y el caos mediante identidades o passwords únicos para acceder a todas las aplicaciones en la web y simplificar nuestros grafos sociales.

E incluso resulta probable el desarrollo de aplicaciones similares a las anteriores pero que respetarán los derechos de los usuarios en la web social , librándonos de marcas y propietarios oportunistas de nuestros datos y los de nuestras relaciones reportadas. Así, cosas como Noserub para redes sociales, aplicaciones propias para lifestreaming (flujo de nuestra actividad en la red) o….adservers (sistemas de anuncios) como OpenX, surgirán como alternativas potentes, incluso al monopolio de la publicidad de Google.

• 2009, más aplicaciones, la web 3.0, sigue el desarrollo en la web hispana:

Nos esperan muchas novedades: la aparición de Digg en español,  Amazon también en nues