RFID-ed Things on the Web of Data and Services

Steve Bratt
Chief Executive Officer
World Wide Web Consortium

RFID Academic Convocation
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA
23 January 2006

http://www.w3.org/2006/Talks/0123-sb-W3C-ThingsWeb/

Mission: Leading the Web to its Full Potential

Founded by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee in 1994, W3C is:

• Providing the Vision to Lead.
• Engineering the Standards that Make the Web Work.

From a Web of Documents ... ... converging toward One Web: of Data and Services on Everything for Everyone ... that is Interoperable, Trustworthy, Evolving with time ...

(Membership / Benefits / "At a Glance" brochure)

The Web Increased the Utility of the Internet

• Initial Web standards brought document-level interoperability to the Internet
  • HTTP provided a simple protocol over TCP/IP
  • URI's provided unique identifiers and locators
  • HTML provided links between parts of documents
• Globally-standard ways to author, identify, retrieve and link documents
  ... revolutionized the way we live and do business
• If aim is to put more RFID- ed Things on the Internet ...
  ... should carefully consider -- and if possible, leverage -- existing and emerging Web standards

From Web of Documents to Web of Data and Services

Recent and emerging W3C Standards aim to:

• Expand the Web to include more machine-understandable resources

• Enable interoperability (syntactic and semantic) between resources you know must interoperable

• Enable interoperability between resources you don't yet know must be interoperable

Recent and Emerging Standards

• Semantic Web: Data on the Web
  • Standards for things, concepts, relationships and descriptions, linked on the Web
  • Easier to Understand, Search for, Share, Re-Use, Aggregate, Extend information

• Web Services: Programs on the Web (see extra slides)
  • Standards for program interfaces and interactions, linked on the Web
  • Easier to Expose and Use services (and data they provide)

Semantic Web

Machine-processable, global Web standards: Assigning unambiguous names (URI) Expressing data, including metadata (RDF) Capturing ontologies (OWL) Query, rules, logic, proofs, trust (in progress) Accessible wherever you want it to be ... ... within and across enterprises ... ... on the Web.

• Semantic Web Activity. (Overview presentation)

Heart of the Semantic Web

• Semantic Web's Resource Description Framework: a W3C standard (Primer)
  • Statements linking data so as to describe things (concepts, objects, etc.)
  • RDF : Data :: HTML : Documents

• Descriptive statements expressed as triples:
  • (Subject, Predicate, Object) or (Subject, Property, Value)
  • Could be called: "Relational Data Format"

• Most useful, Web-wise, when these are URIs, e.g. for this presentation:
  • http://www.w3.org/2006/Talks/0123-sb-W3C-ThingsWeb/ as the subject
  • http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/creator as the property
  • http://www.w3.org/People/all#steve as the value

Current Web

• Minimal machine-processable information -- dumb links

Semantic Web - Enhancement of Current Web

• More machine-processable information: data connected by relationships

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[ellipses = resources; color = one data source; x: = one ontology]

Enterprise Integration Today

Enterprise Integration on the "RDF Bus"

Clients on the "RDF Bus"

New data applications can be built on top of RDF bus, for example:

See Semantic Web interface concepts for other types of data sources (Tim Berners-Lee)

Semantic Web R&D Opportunities 

• Research groups (e.g., MIT/DIG, UMD, UBristol, etc.)
• Commercial initiatives (Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Oracle, Nokia, etc.)
• Conferences (e.g., ISWC, SemTech, etc.)
• Work with W3C to drive incubation and standardization
  • Health Care and Life Sciences, Query, Rules, Best Practices, etc.
• Explore tools
• Create interoperability demonstrators
  • Expose data as RDF
  • Develop domain ontologies
  • Develop maps between ontologies
  • Start developing complex operations across domains
  • Etc.
• Contribute to and leverage network effects as the Semantic Web grows

Thank You

Extra Slides

• W3C Work Organization
  • Domains, Activities, Groups, Standards Stack
• W3C Membership
  • Value proposition, how-to

• Web of Data and Services
  • XML, Web Services, more Semantic Web

Building Community. Engineering Web Standards.

23 Activities/60 Working, Interest and Coordination Groups, supported by the Team

Over 90 W3C Standards Provide the Foundation of the Web

(W3C Activities /List of standards/ svg-by-yr/ Translations)

W3C Membership

• Leadership network
• Member profile
• Member value
• How to join

W3C's International Leadership Network

Expanding base of the world's leading technology organizations and technologists

• Driven by 400 W3C Members (history map, below), including most of the world's leading IT providers and many major IT users - (How to Join)
• 18 Hosts and Offices around the world
• 65 Member-neutral Technical Staff (map)
• 40 Liaisons with other international standards bodies
• Accountable to the Global Public

W3C Membership by Country, Dec 2005 (click to get history)

Member Profile

• W3C's Membership (history map)

  "Third-class companies make products; second-class companies develop technology; first-class companies set standards." *

  ... including ...

  • commercial companies (vendors and consumers), academic institutions, research laboratories, government agencies, and non-profit organizations, which are ...
  • ... developing Web-based products, leveraging Web technologies as an enabling medium for your work, conducting research on the Web and developing specifications built upon W3C's work
  • ... expanding worldwide.

___

* popular saying in Chinese business and government, from China’s Post-WTO Technology Policy: Standards, Software and the Changing Nature of Techno-Nationalism, by Richard P. Suttmeier and Yao Xiangkui.

Value of W3C Membership

• Leadership
  • Introduce new ideas through submissions & workshops
  • Drive new standards through Working Group participation, review, implementation
  • Provide strategic direction through seat on Advisory Committee
    • Each Member has one AC Representative

• Early insight into market trends
  • Access Member & Team technical experts
  • Track emerging technologies & markets through Member-confidential access
  • Implement standards & plan for procurement of new technologies ahead of market

• Promoting image as innovator
  • Participate in international media activities, press releases, testimonials (e.g., MWI)
  • Display organization and logo on W3C site (250K visits/day)
  • Display W3C Member logo on organization's page
  • Ensure & enjoy benefits of royalty-free implementation of Web standards

Working with W3C

• Join W3C
  • http://www.w3.org/Consortium/join
  • Take advantage of benefits (previous slide)
• Public participation and accountability
  • Follow and contribute to public mailing lists
  • Participate in W3C Workshops
  • Contribute to W3C open source software
  • Implement W3C standards
  • Translate a technical report
  • Participate as an Invited Expert (for experts from organizations that cannot join)

Web of Data and Services

• XML
• Web Services
• Extra Semantic Web

XML

• Foundation for W3C's standards
• XML Activity
  • Evolving standards: Core, XSL, Schema, DOM, URI, I18N
• Emerging standards:
  • XML Query, XSLT, XPath
  • Efficient XML Interchange (previous Binary WG developed requirements)
  • XML Processing Model
  • XML Schema Patterns for Data Binding (2005 workshop)
• Future of XML
  • W3C leading community discussion

Web Services

• Overview presentation

• Web Services Activity. Emerging standards:
  • Description (WSDL 2.0), Choreography (CDL 1.0), Addressing (WSA 1.0), Semantic Web Services (workshop)
  • [Architecture, Protocol (SOAP 1.2 ...) (done for now)]
• Possible future work
  • Policy/Constraints&Capabilities

Semantic Web: Adapting SQL/RDBMS Databases

Keep your existing systems running, and add RDF interfaces:

_

Examples of DBMS interfaces: 1.life sciences, 2.conference information

See Semantic Web interface concepts for other types of data sources (Tim Berners-Lee)

Semantic Web: Applications Connected by Concepts

The End