Understanding experience*

Most internet stores allow you to buy things, but do you go shopping? Shopping is as much about going to the shop, feeling the clothes, being with friends. You can go shopping and never intend to spend money. Shopping is not about an efficient financial transaction, it is an experience.
But experience is a difficult thing to pin down; we understand the idea of good experience, but how do we define it and even more difficult how we design it?

*) cited from Dix's HCI book

Guns, Germs, and Steel*

History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves

*) a book of Jared Diamond

will ontology help?

Simple ontologies (taxonomies) provide: *

• Controlled shared vocabulary (search engines, authors, users, databases, programs/agents all speak same language)
• Site Organization, Navigation Support, Expectation setting
• “Umbrella” Upper Level Structures (for extension e.g., UNSPSC)
• Browsing support (tagged structures such as Yahoo!)
• Search support (query expansion approaches such as FindUR, e-Cyc)
• Sense disambiguation (e.g., TAP)

and for more structured ontologies may be used in:

• Consistency checking
• Completion
• Interoperability support
• Support for validation and verification testing configuration support
• Structured, “surgical” comparative customized search
• Generalization/ Specialization
• Foundation for expansion and leverage
  
  *) cited from McGuinness' paper

a stack for the future?

A technology's success

A technology's success is not dependent on how well it works or how "cool" it is -- most of the success is based on business decisions that are made by major business players (so it will be widely adopted)

Metadata is not enough

Three emerging steps beyond simple metadata: semantic level, rule languanges, and inference engines.

Smart data continuum

Semantic Web: a machine-processable web of smart data.

"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation."
-- Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila, The Semantic Web , Scientific American, May 2001