"Semantic Pipes- Towards Web 3.0 Information Systems"

Today I enjoyed giving an invited lecture about "Semantic Pipes- Towards Web 3.0 Information Systems"* to the post-graduated students ("Research and Technology" course, CS671), at the University of Cyprus.

The first part of the lecture gives an introduction about Web 2.0 (Wikis, RSS, Blogs, Mashups, and a live demo about Yahoo Pipes). Although these technologies have shown a great success on how people can collaborate to produce and share content on the web; however, these technologies are still being used for social-oriented web pages. To expose these technologies for business and enterprise applications (i.e. to use it in business), we discuss (in the second part) how to build a Web Information System, where the information sources are distributed over different locations and edited by different people. Similar to the idea of Yahoo Pipes (that processes and mashes up RSS feeds easily), Semantic Pipes can be built to process and query RDF information sources. RDF is not only a well-structured data format, but it enables also the data semantics to be well-defined.

Querying RDF can be done using SPARQL (the RDF query language). In this way, querying multiple RDF sources in SPARQL, processing and storing these queries, and reusing them later -similar to Yahoo pipes- would not only enable information reuse and sharing, but it would also enable meaningful integration, search, access, and interoperation, which are the necessary services for a Web Information System. In this way, one can imagine a Web Information System as a database, where "tables" are seen "RDF sources" (distributed over different locations), and "views" are stored SPARQL queries.
Transforming the data on Web into such databases is called Web3.0.

* I couldn't put the slides online as it is 5MB. Until I reduce the file size, please drop me an email If you would like to have it.

Web 2.0, Social Programming, and Mashups -What is in for me!"

I gave an invited lecture about on Web 2.0 to students in the "Foundations of Internet Technologies" course, at the University of Cyprus. This tutorial was extended and presented again to many colleagues at the computer science department, with a new title "Web 2.0, Social Programming, and Mashups -What is in it for me!" In this tutorial you can see many examples of Web 2.0 websites and mashups. In fact it is very interesting to talk about Web 2.0 and how the big companies (e.g. Google, Yahoo, YouTube, and many others) are taking the lead, encouraging us to contribute, and providing all possible user-friendly interfaces.

As users, we find this is amazing. We feel we have to join these social websites, contribute with content, review products, upload photos and videos, write blogs, and socialize and date through our computers. However, I suspect many of the social websites will fail because of the privacy crises that may come soon. Many users are not aware with the hacking and openness of those websites. Let's wait and see!

From a research viewpoint, I believe Web 2.0. has created a great opportunity for researchers to build on the RSS and Mashup technologies.... which is currently leading to Web 3.0, or I like to call it Semantic Pipes. In other words, Semantic-based Mashups. One way to achieve this (but maybe there are other ways) is to mashup RDF data using SPARQL.