semantic web – The Turning Grille

Drew Olanoff suggests that Twitter could extend the hashtag idea to make “bits and pieces of data clickable.” I’m not a fan of Twitter these days, but I love the idea of incorporating data structure into online content through simple affordances. Ah, so that’s Twitter’s strategy: A “clickable” world – The Next Web:

“By structuring data, Twitter could make its network of information easier to navigate and discover upon. It would also help the company structure its API so that third-party developers wouldn’t have to dig through every single tweet for particular information. I can click or tap around Wikipedia for hours, since everything is linked by its editors. Twitter could engage users in the same way.”

This is why the future is in metadata.

Phil Windley gets us thinking about what a “smart bike” might do:

Imagine the bike being connected to its manufacturer, the bike store that sold it, and its owner. From its earliest point in being, the bike would be able to keep track of data about itself, things like its specifications, when it was made, and even the provenance of the materials used in its manufacture. The bike would keep track of inventory data like when it was delivered to the bike shop, who assembled it, its price, and when it was bought and by who.
And all this would be possible with a personal cloud for a bike.

While Phil’s vision could be accomplished without an on-board bike computer, it’s hard to imagine a truly useful fire-and-forget system without one, or without a connected infrastructure at the important points of presence: the manufacturer, the store, the bike shop, etc. But this sort of automated administration would be useful for all sorts of things, and I don’t see any technical hurdles standing in the way. It’s just a matter of building the supporting schemas and software.

(This post was originally published on The Machine That Goes Ping on 5/26/12)