Popular as it is, the World Wide Web is not going to last forever. Something is going to come along and replace it.
And one of the few people on the planet who seems to understand what that might be is coming to Alberta. Ora Lassila, a guru at Nokia's Boston-area research lab, is giving the keynote address to the Wireless Connections 2005 conference in Calgary this week.
Conference executive director Cassy Weber says the event's mission is to provide a showcase forum for emerging wireless and mobile excellence, primarily focused on Western Canada, and that previous conferences in 2001 and 2003 were sold out. She expects more than 350 hard-core wireless thinkers and people interested in mobile business to converge on the University of Calgary campus this week for "a compelling mix of the practical and the visionary."
Lassila definitely falls at the visionary end of the spectrum, since his topic is The Semantic Web. He co-wrote (with World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee) the 2001 Scientific American article that brought this concept from academic obscurity to something people are buzzing about.
Lassila says that the current World Wide Web is full of information, but it's generally only meaningful when interpreted by humans. "Sure you can put a tag that says 'author' next to a field, but that's just a string of six characters. By itself, it doesn't mean anything to a machine without a human interpreting it."
He envisions a world where machines do more work for us because we teach them how to extract deeper meaning from Internet content. And he says XML, which was supposed to move us in this direction, is "woefully inadequate."
"Semantics can be introduced by agreement," he says. "So basically, when you share a definition, you have some implicit understanding of the meaning."
Together, Lassila and I work out the semantic web concept of dentist. If everybody more or less agrees that a dentist is a person who fixes human teeth (and not, say, canine teeth), then we're on our way to a semantic approach.
I could potentially order my "bot," a program that semi-autonomously does things on my behalf, to make an appointment with a dentist in the city I'm visiting for an emergency filling. My bot would find a suitable dentist and negotiate an appointment time and maybe even the cost. And, because there was agreement on definitions, I'd wind up in a dental chair, not on the table of some veterinary practitioner.
Lassila believes that the best definitions will tend to be more widely adopted and, in a Darwinian process, come to dominate. For example, most computer users mean the same thing when they refer to a zip file, though there might well be competing definitions running around. He says it's important to make definitions easy to share and to extend.
Semantic web researchers have formal ways of doing this, but right now you'd need a computer science degree to understand them. In fact, some have called this whole concept "The Pedantic Web" because, so far, it's been the realm of researchers and very early adopters. But that may be about to change, which is why Lassila gets to give the keynote at a conference on wireless technology.
In a pre-conference interview, he and I discussed what the world would be like if the semantic web becomes a reality. We agree that it would certainly be a lot more convenient to delegate life's annoying little details to a bot, but there would also be risks to privacy.
Given that Lassila works for Nokia, it's clear that he believes we'll be dealing with our lives from handheld devices. Asked if Nokia has any immediate product plans in this area, he meaningfully declines to comment. It's the only time in the interview when he becomes coy, so one can draw some inferences. Since you can hardly walk through an airport without seeing people hypnotically immersed in their PDAs and BlackBerrys, it's fair to say he's on to something here.
But be careful what you let your bot do, because, according to Ian Kerr, Canada research chair in ethics, law and technology at the University of Ottawa, it might be legally binding. Kerr's interpretation of the relevant legislation says that contracts with bots might be enforceable.
Now, if your bot calls my bot and they make a deal, what's the legal status? "It might well be a valid contract under Alberta law," says Kerr, "if a judge felt that the test of a meeting of the minds had been met."
Of course, bots can talk with people too. Kerr gives the example of EllegirlBuddy, a virtual character from that teen-girl magazine. She's a red-headed 16-year-old who lives in San Francisco and likes kickboxing and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
This creation of bits and bytes carries on plausible conversations about fashion and teenage crushes.
Kerr says EllegirlBuddy has been told "I love you" more than two million times, presumably by lovestruck teens with a lot of purchasing power. Since there's a good chance these chats are being logged and analysed, Kerr worries "what else have they told EllegirlBuddy?" A more grownup example of a "virtual representative" bot can be found at Coca-Cola's website. "Hank" is on duty 24/7 to answer even stupid questions such as, "can I buy Coke in kegs?" His helpful reply is, "You may wish to contact the bottler for your area and inquire about the availability of the product you are interested in. Would you like me to help you find your local bottler?" Figuring that he might be dumb enough to spill the company secrets, I ask Hank "What is Coke made from?" He's bright enough to recognize that this is "very valuable proprietary information, we do not discuss the blend of flavouring materials used by the Coca-Cola Co."
It's probably easy for Coke to calculate its return on investment from a project such as Hank. Each inquiry that he handles means one less call to a sweaty person in a call centre.
But is there a business model to drive the whole semantic web?
Lassila acknowledges that it's still unclear "how you turn it into money.”
But every time Hank makes happy talk about Coca-Cola, or EllegirlBuddy dispenses ad-laden fashion advice, we move a little closer to putting some economic fuel in the semantic web's engine.
Web Watch:
www.wirelessconnections2005.com
www.lassila.org
questions.coca-cola.com
(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)
