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The keynote, as usual, is my boss’s boss, Tim Berners-Lee. Feel free to browse the keynote slides.

Tim is talking about domain names of late. Now that the .mobi and .xxx TLDs, among others, has been proposed, though, he has a problem with their intent. Lots of new TLDs have been added, such as the commercialization of national TLDs, and the new .info and .biz. It’s resulted in a whole lot of domains getting bought just to redirect to one central domain. With the new proposed TLDs, now they just have to buy all these other ones just to maintain their brand (example: amazon.xxx).

Good domain management is governed fairly, technically sound, and has value for the overall community. It isn’t just to score easy cash.

One proposed TLD was .xxx. “We’ve been here before” with PICS. And they did it in a way such that one central authority (see: Washington DC) couldn’t determine what is and is not porn. There are other ways to skin this proverbial cat.

.mobi is another issue: they want another TLD to encourage the creation of content for mobile phones and PDAs. But there are also systems that do this without a TLD. “The important thing about the Web is its universality.” It’s hardware-independent, OS-independent, network-independent, independent of language, culture, disability, “quality” of information, and economics of the country of origin.

.mobi “breaks the Web” because it splits the Web into two parts. Say you find a resource on your phone. Can you reuse it on your laptop? Nope. Another question. What’s “mobile”? How small is a small screen? What happens when they get a keyboard? How short is a short attention span? How low is low-bandwidth? We’ve got medium-specific identifiers in CSS to let you design this stuff in one glorious unified format. There’s content negotiation to point different devices to different views, and CC/PP to set profiles of device capabilities. And there’s the separation of form and content we accessibility wonks complain about all the time. (See? There is a bonus for doing things accessibly!) Selling mobile sites is a marketing issue to be solved, not a call for a new TLD.

Separating form and content taken to the extreme: ship the raw data alone, and map it to the user interface. This is called the “Semantic Web”. Lots of papers are floating around this conference on the topic of Semantic Web browsers, where they can interpret ontologies, and traverse different relationships. For example, using FOAF, my address book, and a meeting ontology, you can set agendas without everybody having, say, the same version of Outlook for it all to work.

Tim’s challenge to the audience is an “extensible open framework for the Semantic Web browser” (emphasis in original). That’s not just an idle challenge: “I want them done!”

So far, in Phase 1 of the Semantic Web, “it was a time of constraint”: everything was represented in triples. The RDF and OWL languages have resulted in this phase, both becoming W3C Recommendations.

Phase 2 is different: it’s a time of less constraint. Lots of RDF-based tools are stretching upward fromm the foundations, being used for various different applications, tied together with RDF and OWL.

A Semantic Web agent will handle only certain types of inference. It will have access to only certain sources of data. It will be aware of the provenance of the info it receives. It will be able to exchange data with anything, exchange rules of inference with similar agents, and exchange proofs of anything it learns.

What does it connect? Lots of things. He’s got a couple dozen different individual details which are daisy-chained together to show how things actually interoperate (or could, anyway).

Tim suggests a few ideas for bootstrapping a Semantic Web project. Put things together from data, not by marking things up in RDF by hand. Don’t change existing systems over to RDF immediately, but try some RDF adapters. Try combining data from existing systems that haven’t been connected. Then try running rules on them, or explore the data using OWL to find relationships you may not have known before. The challenge here is to show the “first genuinely serendipitous associations” of data.

He challenges academics and industry people to learn how to speak each other’s language to bridge the Semantic Web’s culture gap.

Tim puts forward the idea of an RDF clipboard that can determine the rules in disparate domains (e.g., dragging your bank statement onto the calendar) and having it figure out how to reconcile that in the interface (showing your purchases in a given time frame).

There’s a chart Tim shows called the Semantic Web bus, but this time, in addition, he showed an actual bus that will be driving around Spain in October, wrapped in the W3C logo, complete with workstations and WiFi, to show the Web’s full potential.

Questions (I love it when a keynote speaker actually takes questions!): One was about the formats of these data structures (like bank statements): Tim says people should be encouraged to work on the format the way they like it. If something else creates a different one, fine. You can decide that you’ll use that one later. No harm, no foul. The message it seems he’s putting forth is that it’s not the same kind of issue as the near-catholic (small c) adherence to today’s data file formats, since they’re all fluid, and putting them together patchwork-style should work, given the underpinnings of the Semantic Web.