Living the Commission of Tim Berners Lee: Connecting shared Conceptualization
After inventing the world wide web, Tim B.L still was not satisfied about how we cant get a hold of what is in the web. Yes, he made it possible for you to put in your contents and today we have over a billion pointers or url to so many information on the web.
What is really a web? I guess he most have truly asked this question and come to the conclusion that we truly have not invented this web but just a floating diversity of materials all over the space, littering everywhere without connectivity
A web should be interconnection of not just your computers, but the contents, concepts and shared entities in those different computers.
I might not be able to quote him, but he gave enough for me to begin to see through what he visioned the web to become.
From the little story you publish about your favorite artist to the mogul business empire information about Job postings etc. He wants every data to connect and make sense.
Today we have been commissioned to get to work and make sure we create this new datanet, make it accessible and free for knowledge lovers, businesses, individuals and so on.
Now How Should We Make This DataNet
First we need a universal and acceptable vocabulary for all unique domains, for example the medical field communicates in a way different from the law field and different from the press and different from the industry or manufacture and so on.
Various organizations have built schemas around these, but because this information is so frequently accessed, Microsoft and Google (along with Russian search engine Yandex) came together in 2011 to establish a website called schema.org.
All we have to do now is to use the schema relating to the domain which our concept discuss to share and make accessible data that concerns us and wish the public to access. Doing this will also enable various search engine giants present our information in a more professional and eye catchy means.
Today, there are nearly six hundred distinct types, in areas as diverse as
- Creative works: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries …
- Embedded non-text objects: AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject
- Event
- Health and medical types: notes on the health and medical types under MedicalEntity
- Organization
- Person
- Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant …
- Product, Offer, AggregateOffer
- Review, AggregateRating
- Action (list courtesy of schema.org)
In order to represent concepts in your domain using the schema vocabulary, Google and other search giants recommends JSON-LD.
JSON-LD is a just JSON but it enables us to embed schema.org vocabulary to help build meaning around shared concepts within your domain.
The script is usually written on the head tag or the body of your pages where you wish to share important information within that page content.
<script type=”application/ld+json”>
{
“@context”: “http://schema.org",
“@type”: “Recipe”,
“author”: “Jake Smith”,
“cookTime”: “PT2H”,
“datePublished”: “2015–05–18”,
“description”: “Your recipe description goes here”,
“image”: “http://www.example.com/images.jpg",
“recipeIngredient”: [ “ingredient 1”, “ingredient 2”, “ingredient 3”, “ingredient 4”, “ingredient 5” ],
“interactionStatistic”:
{
“@type”: “InteractionCounter”,
“interactionType”: “http://schema.org/Comment”,
“userInteractionCount”: “5”
},
“name": “Rand’s Cookies”,
“nutrition”:
{
“@type”: “NutritionInformation”,
“calories”: “1200 calories”,
“carbohydrateContent”: “12 carbs”,
“proteinContent”: “9 grams of protein”,
“fatContent”: “9 grams fat”
},
“prepTime”: “PT15M”,
“recipeInstructions”: “This is the long part, etc.”,
“recipeYield”: “12 cookies”
}
</script>
If everyone begin this commission, we would achieve the dream of connecting data to another data to another data from anywhere around the world. Hence, a semantic web of information- shareable, accessible, free and identifiable
The only challenge I see now is building a shared endpoint engine that will enable those who want to query from different data endpoint do so. Imagine asking the endpoint engine question like this-
Hey Machine- I need a list of all employees who worked from year 2008 to year 2010 earning salaries above 1,000,000 from any manufacturing firm and these employees have medical certification that proves they were healthy at that time; check that these employees paid their taxes during those years.
Now you see, we might be connecting to various websites that have presented shared concepts using JSON-LD.
First it will query Manufacturing Organizations and pull out all employees that satisfies the 1,000,000 filter, then match these employees names to medical Endpoints to get the medical certification- if shared using JSON-LD and further travel to the Tax Endpoint to know if they paid their taxes. This made possible using JSON-LD.
I think talking about we having much data all over the internet should not be the issue, the issue should be how to connect these data to be well understood by both machine and man- then we can begin to think on the numerous things we would be able to achieve.
Let’s continue in this commission to actualize the vision of Tim Berner’s Lee.
