The Semantic Web: What You Need to Know
At our SoCon07 unconference the words Semantic Web started cropping up more than at any other conference I have attended. Perhaps it was just the people with whom I was talking to the most. World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, has been touting the Semantic Web since about 1999. In an early essay in Scientific America, Berners-Lee and others gave a quick overview. From a user’s point of view, in their example, it will round up and make connections between lots of seemingly disparate information. Sort of like your brain does.
So someone in your family gets sick and needs urgent care. The Semantic Web would instantly report back based on information already on the web about hospitals and urgent care centers, about your sick family member, about your family income, your location, your insurance, your other family members and basically give you the best option. You can agree with the option or can tweak the information for other options, then the Semantic Web will make all the arrangements for you in minutes.
Sounds great, sign me up. However, it is harder to do than it sounds. It requires some deep tinkering with how web language is constructed, which move into territory that I don’t understand. However, people like Clay Shirky do and at least back in 2003 he thought it was being over sold.
Nonetheless Berners-Lee via the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) continues on the quest to build a workable system. Indeed, W3C is a one-stop location for everything from introductory explanations to getting involved in writing code. However, don’t expect the definitions to be easy to decipher. Even the FAQs seem to require advanced degrees in technology, philosophy, information science and linguistics– and I’m just a former newspaper guy.
I am reminded of the early 1990s, when I was first reading about the Internet. I understood its potential and would be touting it to friends and colleagues, but each time I tried to understand how it really worked technologically, I knew I was way, way out of my element. And so it is with the Semantic Web.
So maybe the title for this post should have been The Semantic Web: What I Need to Know. But that is exactly why I need the Semantic Web. I hope it will understand who I am by making associations and then quickly deliver customized information to me in a form that I could understand, which would be in a much different form than what would be delivered to Clay Shirky.
That brings us back to Berners-Lee. Remember, he invented the World Wide Web, so we have to listen carefully. Here he is, again in a 2005 interview:
Let me start by saying our work in promoting rather than developing the Semantic Web technologies has been like deja vu all over again for me. Fifteen years ago, one of the hardest things to do was not to develop the initial version of HTTP, or to create a browser that was also an editor, or even to get approval for the purchase of the equipment (!). The difficult thing was to convince people that the Web was something they should adopt.
… the killer app that got us through the technical barriers … was making the phone book available through the Web. In the outside world, beyond lab settings, what helped the Web break through were two simultaneous developments … making the code available to anyone who would like it free of charge or other encumbrance, and that young developers were coming up with browser software, including multiple implementations that supported inline images. … But imagine, if you can, online information systems before the Web, and what it was like to try to explain the whole idea of the Web to people.
Envisioning life in the Semantic Web is a similar proposition. Some people have said, “Why do I need the Semantic Web? I have Google!” Google is great for helping people find things, yes! But finding things more easily is not the same thing as using the Semantic Web. It’s about creating things from data you’ve complied yourself, or combining it with volumes (think databases, not so much individual documents) of data from other sources to make new discoveries. It’s about the ability to use and reuse vast volumes of data. Yes, Google can claim to index billions of pages, but given the format of those diverse pages, there may not be a whole lot more the search engine tool can reliably do. We’re looking at applications that enable transformations, by being able to take large amounts of data and be able to run models on the fly — whether these are financial models for oil futures, discovering the synergies between biology and chemistry researchers in the Life Sciences, or getting the best price and service on a new pair of hiking boots.
He adds:
The Semantic Web idea — that of having data as well as documents on the web — has been around since the start of the web. It is just more complicated to do. Experience from the initial growth of the web of documents? Well, it was a very rigid exponential growth, which couldn’t be slowed or hastened. Different people ‘got it’ in different years, and to them it seemed that the web had ‘happened’ all that year. It spread first among enthusiasts, and then among small subcommunities where one could get to critical mass with the momentum of a few champions. These communities (High Energy Physics for the WWW, possibly Life Sciences for Semantic Web) are full of people who have very big challenges to tackle, and are largely scientifically minded people who understand the new paradigm. These things may be very similar.
In another co-authored article The Semantic Web Revisited, Bernes-Lee says:
Experience suggests that an incubator community with a pressing technology need is an essential prerequisite for success. In the original Web, this community was high energy physicists who needed to share large document sets. It’s easier to mobilize 10 percent of a small but focused community than 10 percent of the general populace– these early adopters are critical.
In the Bernes-Lee interview he says:
There is an entirely new set of applications we could imagine, with the only limiting factor being our imagination.
To see the Semantic Web in progress visit the Simile project.
