Popularizing the Semantic Web
It’s gratifying to see core concepts about the semantic web being popularized. I see the first step in this long journey in mass adoption being understanding. To date, I believe only a rarified few have thoroughly grasped the utility and ultimate power of a semantified web. Unfortunately, there are a lot more folks on the skeptical side of the fence. A lot of folks overpromised and underdelivered early on in this game (anyone hear the rattle of artificial intelligence in the background?).
I’m relatively convinced that most people agree that getting to something approaching the panacea of the semantic web requires a hybrid approach, or at least a number of intermediary steps. For example, there’s RSS, microformats, and even effective use of tagging. It’s just a matter of pulling together the right tools in a useful configuration to strike the appropriate chord.
For example, EngTech effectively makes this point:
This is how I look at the semantic web: it’s all Legos. With the current web your individual blocks are things like posts, comments, bookmarks, etc. You have tools like RSS, XML and JSON to put the blocks together (ie: Yahoo Pipes). These blocks are big and they only come in a few basic colours. They are the Legos of the 1970s.
With the semantic web it is like modern Legos. The blocks are smaller, and come in many more different sizes and shapes. It makes it easier to build more detailed and complex structures.
Fortunately, Nova and his pals over at Radar Networks as well as the crew at MetaWeb are building real-world examples of what can be accomplished. This initial foray is doing wonders for ramping up the buzz and bringing in some early outside attention. To that end, tech evangelist Robert Scoble is starting to pick it up as evidenced by his recent post, I finally get “semantic” Web (annotated):
I finally understood what the semantic Web was all about and what benefits it’d bring us. I don’t think I could explain it in ASCII text. I think that’s the problem. I read Tim Berners-Lee’s paper. I didn’t get it. I read tons of other stuff about it. I didn’t get it. It took someone building a new system and demonstrating it to me for me to get it.
Basically Web pages will no longer be just pages, or posts. They’ll all be split up into little objects, stored in a database (a massive, scalable one at that) and then your words can be displayed in different ways. Imagine a really awesome search engine that could bring back much much more granular stuff than Google can today. Or, heck, imagine you could view my blog by posts with most inbound links.
Another good point, speaking to the skeptics was made by Peter Rip:
The ‘semantic web will fail’ meme has been around a long time. As you saw, Radar is not trying the semanticize the entire web. It’s a semantic app. It just so happens that like any good app, it tends to encourage ‘good behavior’ from the rest of the world that wants to interact with it, but the app stands on its own. That’s the main point the Semweb naysayers don’t get. Semantic web technologies work and are great for building useful apps - the world doesn’t need to speak the same language for us to be able to work together. But speaking the same language definitely reduces translation friction.
To keep us honest, though, Simon Cast makes sure we’re not taking leave of our senses to jump on the semantic web bandwagon, blindly leaving other techniques behind:
Much of the magic of semantic web can be achieved by other means. There is certainly something to be said for making it easier to find common information (hell I would love all blogs were marked in a common to make it easy to process them) but there is a lot to be said for statistical analysis as well.
April 7th, 2007 at 3:10 am
Trent,
I have read Robert Scoble’s post. Certainly Robert has given the Rader networks’ product a very high score. Though I have not seen their demo, I can actually imagine what may be going on in their product since I am currently working on the same direction.
I need not speak more exciting words about this coming real semantic web product since there have been plenty of already. But what I can see is that a basic problem is still there, i.e., who defines semantics. Certainly semantic web can bring great facilities to users. But the problem is who are going to take control of these semantics.
A fundamental reason that the Semantic Web community has been limited within the acedamic realm for so many years is not due to technical barriers, though they are problems. Most importantly, Semantic Web researchers always try to make themselves be “Gods” of some realms. A small group of smart (and indeed they are very smart) people want to enfore their beliefs to all the people over the world. This is, however, not impractical because the WWW is an open society.
As a semantic web researcher, I can imagine what is going on at Radar Networks and even guess which technologies they have employed. But I am still not sure whether they have tried to hand the meaning definition to the public or they still want to control them in their own hand. If they have solved the first problem, I will be really excited because it thus means the age of semantic web really comes. Otherwise, it is still a great product. But the semantic web age, en… Let’s wait for the next achievement.