Wednesday 9 April 2008 - morning sessions

The final plenary sessions were set to provide a thought - provoking ending to the UKSG conference.

Web 3.0: how to help users stop reading the web and get on with their work. Geoffrey Bilder, CrossRef described the impact of the internet as comparable to the invention of the print press, which represented enormous change and an explosion in content. As with the printing press, users find the original web (Web 1.0) still isn’t easy to read. Web 2.0 makes this easier - essentially Web 2.0 is a read and write web offering guidance to researchers regarding what to pay attention to. Blogs are being used academically (as well as socially); Wikis are used to produce collaborative academic writing and web bookmarks can also be used to show what people are reading - e.g. citeulike. This creates a trust network and acts as a very powerful way of sharing information as well as providing academics with a real time bibliography.

The next generation of the web, Web 3.0, doesn’t just allow users to read and write but also to compute and identify. Rather than read all the data, you can treat the web as a database, use robots to find out what to pay attention to and use metadata to identify things of interest. RDF (Resource description framework) is a protocol of semantic web which helps treat the web as a database, structuring how the information is described which in turn allows it to be queried like a database. While we are constantly developing better ways to collect important bits of information - indexes, glossaries, etc were used with books - there now needs to be better ways to extract important bits of information from the web.

Semantic open data in scientific publications (Peter Murray-Rust, University of Cambridge)

Ditching PowerPoint under the belief that it “destroys information” this presentation was carried out solely using live HTML to emphasise the point that HTML was created for publishing information.

Key to science publishing is the need to access scientific data, however scientific data can be made inaccessible during the process of publication (either not published, or not easily searchable as with PDFs) or hidden behind firewalls or copyright. As well as the full text he urged that we should publish data.

Information that is available needs to be reprocessed to make it useful or analysed to get at the embedded facts. Nick Day has created a Crystal Eye robot to find crystallography on the web, which is freely available but not well structured. However wide scale data mining is limited by copyright restrictions.

Text mining is a consequence of the semantic web. Robots can select subjects, summarise large documents, provide graphical information or data very quickly but are legally restricted. With semantic authoring the author tags work with metadata during writing which then aids locating information by other researchers.

A keen advocate of Open Access movement, the speaker believes we need to open data to be able to recreate the science.

Dealing with disruptive innovation (Richard Withey, Digital Media Consultant)

This speaker used newspapers as an indicator of digital consumer changes. There are close to 30 billion web pages but a lot of growth is yet to come. In terms of web penetration the big markets are now in Asia and other emerging economies and the the web is not expected to be dominated by the English language.

Online is second only to TV; 60% of households in the UK have broadband and young users spend 4-5 hours a day using it. The projected growth in advertising is huge - the market is now bigger than for direct mail, newspapers and now regional newspapers - and it's predicted that online advertising will overtake TV advertising by 2009. We now have fragmentation, disintermediation and personalisation and some predict a dim future for traditional media in the online space.

The bulk of newspaper revenue money comes from adverts - up to two-thirds. Only the biggest newspapers could survive on cover price alone. One way of increasing circulation has been through giveaways - CDs or DVDs, but do these still work?

Social networks are being targeted as the next advertising media. Google aims to give the user everything they want, but newspapers can’t make much money from new media, they need to learn from other media sources - music, TV and other broadcast media have found new distribution formats. Newspapers have always enjoyed a revenue stream split between advertising & circulation, leading to a virtuous circle of self interest which largely excludes the consumer. The new supply chain is consumer driven.

Karina & Kathryn