Last month, eSynapse was approached to put together a session for Business Blog and SNS World 08 at BigSight from May 28th to 30th.

With only a few days to settle on the session content, we quickly decided to do a panel discussion on Open Data and Mashups, and how they relate to the event main topic.  The session is on the 29th (Thu) from 12:00 to 12:45.

I pulled together a collection of industry colleagues to participate, and Andrew Shuttleworth from Tokyo2Point0 volunteered to moderate the session.  

The Panelists are:

Nob Seki, President of Six Apart Japan
Yukihisa Yonemochi, Enterprise Evangelist from IBM
Yusuke Kawasaki, Chief Architect at Recruit Media Labs
Yuki Naotori, Industry Consultant with 7ns.jp, Creator of OnGMap

I am truly grateful that they will help out in our little session.

On Thursday we all got together at Fujimamas in Harajuku to discuss the session and have dinner.

It was great to get to know the guys a little better, and to hear their thoughts and angles on all things web.  I have no worries that we won't have enough to talk about, I just hope we can keep the talk on topic for everyone listening. :)

Andrew will be there cracking the whip, as we only have a short 45 minutes.  We are accepting questions online before the event, and may also try out a QRCode based survey on the audience in real-time, if I can get the reporting screen working right by the day!

If you are thinking of coming out to the event, please check out our session.

Network Event

On a side note, we are co-hosting a network event on site at BigSight with Tokyo2Point0 that evening from 6:15pm ... please come along if you are out there.  There will be free drinks and nibbles after a long day's expo - many thanks to sponsors Paypal and Optia Partners.

I went along to the "Facebook Developer Garage" at an event space in Harajuku.  There was a fairly basic introduction to Facebook Applications given solely in English :( , followed by free wine and snacks, and then a series of talks from local developers of Facebook apps.  I hung around to see Junya Ishihara present his "Kanji-Fandom" application, and Yuki from OnGMap informs me that there were three more demos after that, followed by a bit of networking time.

Dr. John Breslin is a senior semantic web researcher working at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute in Galway, Ireland.  We met at the BlogNation Japan launch party at Web2.0 Expo Japan, and then again at BlogTalk2008 - a conference he was organising in Cork.  I was interested to learn a little more about DERI, and how it engages with business, so fired him some questions by email, for which he has kindly found time in his mad schedule to respond to.

How did DERI come about, and why the focus on semantic technologies?

DERI was established at the National University of Ireland, Galway in late 2003 as part of an initiative by Science Foundation Ireland, an Irish government-funded agency, to establish what are called Centres for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSETs) in the areas of ICT and biotech at various third-level institutions around Ireland.  The chosen focus for DERI was the Semantic Web, as there was and is a recognised need for research into how to manage the information explosion on the Web using semantic technologies.

How did the Seoul and Stanford branches get started?

The senior researchers and directors at DERI had long-established ties with Stanford University; DERI director Professor Decker previously worked there for some time.  In conjunction with Mike Genesereth and Charles Petrie from the Stanford Logic Group, NUI Galway agreed with Stanford University to establish "DERI Stanford" under whose umbrella formal research collaborations between DERI Galway and Stanford could progress.

As regards Korea, DERI researchers had been working with staff from Seoul National University for a number of years, in particular the Biomedical Knowledge Engineering Laboratory (BiKE) led by Professor Hong-Gee Kim.  There has also been a series of researcher exchanges between our two institutions (and DERI Galway also has a PhD student who originated in SNU), so a formal arrangement was confirmed in late 2007 leading to the creation of DERI Seoul.

Any specific reason for Korea in the Asia region?

With rapidly growing communications and scientific infrastructures in Korea, it was recognised that there are a large number of Korean institutions (academic and commercial) who are focusing on the application of semantic technologies to the ICT and biotech domains.  As such, it made sense to establish DERI Seoul to liaise with these organisations and to identify common challenges that could be tackled through various research projects (some of these in conjunction with DERI Galway).

I see on your website that your mission includes assisting the commercialisation of semantic technologies through "Business Development Outreach".  Can you tell me how you engage with businesses, perhaps with some examples?

As part of DERI's remit from Science Foundation Ireland, we have two "outreach" branches, the first being community and education outreach (working with local groups and schools) and the second is business outreach.  Business outreach means that we have staff at DERI who work with various local SMEs and multinationals, describing the research areas that DERI is involved in and investigating if there is a potential need for the application of semantic technologies to solve research challenges in these organisations.

Business outreach also includes efforts to bring together related companies to solve common research requirements (e.g., the Elite initiative brings together seven or eight companies in the domain of semantics applied to e-learning).  DERI has also attracted a number of companies to Galway based on our reputation and our expertise base; some of these have relocated staff and others are establishing new bases near NUI Galway.

What areas do you see semantic technologies being use commercially, and perhaps for online consumer applications in particular?

I think that we are now beginning to see the real commercial applications of what can be done when all kinds of things on the Web are connected together using semantics.  This is obvious in the attention being given to startup companies in this space like Powerlabs (Powerset), Metaweb (Freebase) and Radar Networks (Twine), and also since many big companies including Reuters (Calais API), Yahoo! (semantically-enhanced search) and Google (Social Graph API) have recently announced what they are doing with semantic data.  There has been a lot of talk recently about the social graph (notably from Google's Brad Fitzpatrick), which looks at how people are connected together (friends, colleagues, neighbours, etc.), and how such connections can be leveraged across websites.  In the Semantic Web, it is not just people who are connected together in some meaningful way, but documents, events, places, hobbies, pictures, you name it!  And it is the commercial applications that exploit these connections that are now becoming interesting.

Radar Networks' Nova Spivack recently gave a keynote talk at BlogTalk 2008 as CEO of one of the companies that is practically applying Semantic Web technologies to social software applications.  Radar have a product called Twine, which is a "knowledge networking" application that allows users to share, organise, and find information with people they trust.  I find Twine very interesting, and as well as using it to gather information about SIOC (more below), I intend to use it to gather and publish personal interests that I think will be of interest to the public.

Part of your work is with SIOC - a web standards submission for connecting online communities.  How is that process going?

SIOC is an initiative that I've been working on for the past four years at DERI (with Uldis Bojars, Stefan Decker, and others) that aims to make semantic data available from online communities and Web 2.0 spaces, and to use and leverage that data in interesting and useful ways.  As well as being the Irish word for frost, SIOC stands for "Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities" and the schema or vocabulary of terms that serves as its basis was recently submitted as a Member Submission to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).  We have about 30 or 40 SIOC applications and modules that use and consume SIOC data already.

The process to achieve traction with SIOC was as follows.  Firstly, we created the schema of terms (Site, User, Forum, Post, Container, Item, etc.).  Then, we made some SIOC metadata exporters for various open-source discussion systems and popular community sites, in the hope that we could "infect" the Web infrastructure with semantics - during the next upgrade cycle, gigabytes of community data can become available (a case in point will be the forthcoming SIOC producer for Irish message board site boards.ie).  To produce this mass of linked data from various online communities, we wanted to allow people to easily integrate SIOC with their open-source applications and services, such that there are now SIOC data producers and wrappers available for a range of systems including b2evolution, Dotclear, Drupal, phpBB, WordPress, mailing lists, IRC, Twitter, Jaiku, and others.  The next step was to produce easy-to-use APIs for writing your own SIOC applications.  We have APIs already for PHP, Ruby on Rails and Java.  As well as academic papers about SIOC, we then provided some easy-to-read documentation and usage examples at our SIOC website (http://sioc-project.org/).

Are there some interesting implementations of SIOC?  How is uptake of the blog service plugins?

I think that the interesting applications that are appearing now are those Web 2.0 or Semantic Web applications that realise the advantages of producing SIOC data (and other semantic formats, especially FOAF).  Companies like Seesmic, Talis, OpenLink Software and Radar Networks have either implemented SIOC support in their commercial applications or will do so shortly.

The WordPress plugin is probably the most popular SIOC data producer, but Giovanni Tummarello and his team will shortly release a very interesting plugin that shows one advantage of producing SIOC data from various sites.  This new plugin will allow you to click on an icon beside a blog poster or commenter and view a synopsis of their content and topics created across a range of semantically-enabled websites (as gathered by the semantic indexer Sindice).

Thanks again to John for sharing this with us.  For more information, check out John's Blog: http://johnbreslin.com/

Back in close-to-realtime now, another month, another great Tokyo2Point0 at Fujimamas.  This month Andrew scored a good one, with Kakaku.com coming along to give side project Photohito.com its first public outing. 

Photohito.com

Yasuda-san, CIO of Kakaku.com introduced the session with some background, saying that over 2 million visitors come to Kakaku.com each month to research camera prices and information.  Photohito.com is a new style of photo sharing site that leverages the data from kakaku.com and combines it with some photographer-centric features to provide a valuable service to these camera - and in particular DSLR - camera users.

Shinya Sugiyama, System Platform Engineer, gave the talk.  He explained how Photohito.com was basically born of his dissatisfaction with existing photo sites such as Flickr, Yahoo Photo and the like.  When he was researching buying a lens for his camera, he wished he could see shots taken with the lens, and see discussions and information about lens and other camera information more easily.  With sales of digital compact cameras and digital SLRs still strong, it seemed that there would be a demand of such a site, so me pitched the idea to his directors, and got permission to start a part-time project.

In the Kakaku.com database of lens and camera information, he saw the basis of an ontology to support sharing, showing and searching, not just of photos themselves, but information on how, where and when the photos were taken.  Information on what lens was used can be tagged to photos manually, in addition to the EXIF data extracted automatically from the photo files. 

Hence a photo sharing site becomes a knowledge sharing site, and enthusiasts can learn as well as look.  From there they can link back to the pricing and "Kuchikomi" (word-of-mouth) forums on Kakaku.com

In order to attract film camera users, the team have supplemented their database with film SLRs, but the focus of the site is domestic, so currently the database contains only Japan model information.

The site has only been open for two weeks, and there are now 1500 users with over 10,000 photos.  Currently users may store up to 1000 photos of up to 8MB each, giving a generous free maximum storage quota of 8G.  Site design was done by Tokyo2Point0 and Tech Talk Japan Z-list celebrity, Jon Youngfook.

Press Army

Second speaker was Mike Sheetal, boss-man at Ultra Super New.  He presented the alpha of his Press Army media aggregator, a one-stop-shop for collecting all your communications stuff.  It can monitor blogs, images and videos, and allows for input of offline media that you might want to track.  Project owners have the luxury of controlling what items are associated with their projects, so you can guarantee a positive spin.  While this is what project owners want, how the populace embrace it as a resource will be seen in time. 

Attendees to Tokyo2Point0 were given an invite, and I have signed up for the service.  Will check it out and see what Press Army's slant adds to the growing army of feed aggregators.

After the long afternoon of sessions ... basically six hours with only 10 minute breaks .. everyone was ready for a change of scene, and we moved on to drinks, snacks, and Birds of a Feather Lighting talks at Shin Marubiru.

Here everyone - presenters included - began to let their hair down, and as the beer flowed, some of the most entertaining - if not necessarily useful sessions of the day were had.

Opening Greetings from CNet

Apple evangelist talking up web-kit

URLs -> URIs -> XRI

The guy from Walful.org showed off some funky-arsed HTML based browser detection.

Big ups to Gen Kanai from Mozilla and to SixApart and CNet for a full on event!

Building an "imadoki', or "nowadays" application was the topic of the panel discussion.

On stage were Tatsuhiko Miyagawa, software engineer from Six Apart, an Yukihisa Yonemochi, Technology Evangelist from IBM.

While the contrasting views on Openness and Open Source didn't lead to any passionate disagreement, it was interesting to see the two companies' differing approaches.  Miyagawa-san is a big contributor to Open Source Perl projects, and while IBM also invest in open source projects, they have a corporate manual for engaging with OSS, and the projects they run themselves are subject to different licences. 

The one project that has been raising it's head recently is Project Zero. Project Zero is a Java-based engine for creating RESTful web applications, that can be programmed against in either java or PHP, and is designed to give PHP and Java folks the simplicity and productivity of a Rails like experience.  The project is not open source, though, and fall into IBM's Community Driven Commercial Software Development (CDCD) model.  This means that the code is open for anyone to inspect and suggest corrections or improvements for, but IBM are the the only committers, so they retain control over exactly what makes it into the final build. 

This approach allows them to provide a high level of warantee for their products, but I feel that the whole idea of community drive development is that in a way, the strength of the community provides the warantee, and in a more responsive way that having a central control bottleneck.  If I have a specific issue with the code, then I can suggest that IBM fix it, but it still remains up to their discretion to fix it.  Similarly, say that the IBM powers that be decide that they no longer consider the product "strategic" and decide to orphan it.  How does that work if the community needs to continue using and supporting it?

Next Yohnemochi-san presented some slides showing how IBM planned to support what he described as an explosion in the growth of applications. 

US Research presented describes what I call the "Geek Spectrum" of application developers, from hard core J2EE coders, through scripting language based Web Developers, to business users who have traditionally put together macros,  but can now create mashups and hook in to other services by assembling apps from building blocks.

To enable each of these segments of the spectrum, IBM has various tools, and the aforementioned Project Zero is targetted at the upper end of the Web Developer layer.

Finally they both talked about Open Source, and there were questions about how it worked in Japan verses in the west.  Miyagawa-san said that feeback for open source projects comes much quicker overseas, probably because people have more willingness to state their minds.  Yonemochi-san raised some embarrassed chuckes when he said that Japan had been compared to a black hole for Open Source ... everything gets sucked in,  but nothing ever comes out again.   Harsh!   He also said that due to the difference in geographical size, some companies in the US retain onsite engineers, where in Japan they might not, simply from the practical stand point of physical response time.  Most places in Japan are reachable within a few hours, but that is not so in the US.

Back at Builder Techday ... the next speaker, Masashi Sawada from Nifty, was there to provide a little historical context.  He has been at Nifty for 10 years, and talked about Nifty's place in the movement from PC Communication networks to the Open Internet.

Openness at Nifty

Much of the talk was about how Nifty's were forced become more open with the explosion in internet use in the late 90s.  During that time they moved from proprietary file systems, proprietary mail and messaging.  Initially they created bridging systems and gateways to link their existing back ends to the Internet, but soon this became a maintenance nightmare, as more and more systems had to be bridged.  These were soon replace with the standards-based systems we  now take for granted. 

OpenID at Nifty

Initial adoption of OpenId has been tempered with caution.  They consider the risk of becoming an OpenID Provider (OP) too high, and have opted to just become a consumer, or Relying Party (RP), with their Aboutme product.  This approach contrasts of that of Yahoo, who are opting to be just an OP. 

One risk they identified was that as anyone can set up and OpenID provider, anyone could set up multitudes of users and use these to automate comment SPAM and other attacks.  To get around this, only OPs on a whitelist maintained by Nifty may be used.  As my OpenID provider is not on the list, I cannot sign in .... not so open after all :(, but certainly a valid concern for Relying Parties.

In addition to OpenID, they also support Yahoo ID, Livedoor, Hatena, Jugem and Typekey logins, and they expect to increase the whitelist providers over time.

    Third up was Chris Beard - VP of Products at Mozilla Corp.  He explained the structure of Mozilla, and the mission of the Mozilla Foundation to deliver value to the web - rather than just to shareholders.  He talked about the the Mozilla community worldwide, and then about Mozilla Labs and Mozilla Messaging.

Mozilla Messaging is the organisation set up to support the future development of Thunderbird and related efforts.  Version 3.0 is coming up with an improved extensibility framework, calendar integration and improved search.  My addition to that list would definitely be non-sucky IMAP support - I have problems with their treading model, where a deleted message stays active for a random few seconds before disappearing, causing navigation issues, especially a problem if you are deleting several messages.

Mozilla Labs is Mozilla's centre of thought leading for the future of the web.  Their mission is to generate ideas, and quickly develop and release products aroudn these ideas.  Their current prototype - "Weave" - is an attempt to break up the various parts of the web experience, and make them interchangable, and move some of them to the cloud.  Bookmarks, History, Customisation and Identity are separated out, as are the underlying technical elements - Rendering, Javascript, Networking, Graphics, Parsing, Persistence, Messaging and Sync. 

Weave is still at 0.1 alpha release, and how all this modularity plays out is yet to be seen, but it does represent a challenging new paradigm, extending the extensibility - if you like - hinted at by the traditional browser construct of engine plus chrome that we have seen in Gecko, Trident, WebKit, etc.

But by opening up all these elements, developers will be able to incorporate them in other web experiences - not just browsers.  Users will be able to have similar experiences in other web-enabled applications.

Second Speaker was Kazuya Ishikawa from Verisign Japan, talking about the Open ID initiative. Verisign is one of the corporate members of the Japan chapter of the OpenID Foundation. 

He was explaining OpenID as User-centric ID Management, enabled by logically separating the ID provider from the provider of the service being logged into.

The benefits of Open ID are:

- Easy to remember than multiple passwords
- Not centralised (you may have multiple providers as a fallback)
- User can control what personal information is exposed to which services
- Simple and lightweight
- Easy to use and implement (I can attest to that, it took all of half an hour to implement on this blog!)

Open ID does not specify the authentication mechanism, and enables the OpenID provider to use stronger authentication if they wish.  This is where Verisign have applied their technology, with a device that can be used to generate a number that the user must input in addition to their username and password, to give that additional security.

Verisign also provide an OpenID management service, which allows you to monitor all your OpenID providers from one location.  I didn't understand how this works, as being a decentralised system, how can Verisign know when I have authenticated against say MyOpenID.com?  Sounds like there is more to that story ... anyone?

The Open API & Beyond Builder Techday event organised by CNet Networks Japan and Six Apart was held at Bellsalle Yaesu, near Tokyo Station on the 28th of January.

The event was oversubscribed, and I missed out on the draw, but Gen Kanai from Mozilla came to my rescue and helped me get a pass to join the event.  Han Kessels from Tech Talk Japan was also there, and we both managed to charm our way into passes for the BOF and drinks session in the evening (many thanks to the tall lady from CNet!)