RE: "State of the Semantic Web" - personal opinions?

I believe this is the same paper that Olivier Rossel cited in response
to the thread on "RDF/OWL/Sparql and native XML databases".  From my
point-of-view, this is intriguing because of the possibility to store
(and query) metadata as XML alongside (in the same database) the content
that it describes.  Once I learned more about N3 and Turtle, I haven't
spent much time with RDF/XML but I've always felt that RDF/XML was
important (albeit more complex) and I became curious how the fact that
it is expressed as XML might become beneficial in a native XML database.
The problem (in my mind) became that fact that XQuery (which is what
most XML databases currently focus on other than REST) works on a
different model than RDF.  The possibility to perform both an XQuery and
a SPARQL query against the same database would be great.

 

As an aside, I became interested in the semantic technologies as an
offshoot of my interest in XML.  Over the years, I noticed that "XML
conferences" only had a bare representation of RDF and OWL
presentations.  It took some time for me to realize that RDF/OWL/SPARQL
are not really XML technologies (although parts can be expressed as
XML).  Once that dawned on me and I understood about the underlying
model, a light-bulb appeared over my head.  I find it intriguing that
I'm now interested in pushing back toward the XML focus.

 

 

________________________________

From: semantic-web-request@w3.org [mailto:semantic-web-request@w3.org]
On Behalf Of adasal
Sent: Friday, July 11, 2008 11:15 AM
To: Danny Ayers
Cc: semantic-web@w3.org
Subject: Re: "State of the Semantic Web" - personal opinions?

 

Danny, all,
I came on this paper yesterday.
I consider this work a highly significant development and wonder what
others think.
This is the link:-
http://www.eswc2008.org/final-pdfs-for-web-site/qpI-1.pdf
Title;-
XSPARQL: Traveling between the XML and RDF
worlds - and avoiding the XSLT pilgrimage?
First sentence of abstract:-
Abstract. With currently available tools and languages, translating
between an
existing XML format and RDF is a tedious and error-prone task. The
importance
of this problem is acknowledged by the W3C GRDDL working group who faces
the issue of extracting RDF data out of existing HTML or XML files, as
well as
by the Web service community around SAWSDL, who need to perform lowering
and lifting between RDF data from a semantic client and XML messages for
a
Web service.
There has been other work in the area not mentioned in this paper - but
also funded by EU, in Turkey (Ioachim note).
It is important in my opinion because there is so much data that is or
could be in XML and one path to treating it semantically is to place it
in XML, use it like this and then, as needs, migrate into OWL.
I think this area is as important as SPARQL is for querying disparate
data sources.
Regards
Adam

2008/6/26 Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com>:

In brief, some time soon I'm planning to do a moderately comprehensive,
fairly non-technical write-up on this topic (for Nodalities [1] - has
quite a large & varied readership, including Planet RDF :-) 
I'd like to try to be as objective as possible (personal ideosyncracies
aside). But I'm really hesitant... I want to do the topic justice, but
am totally ignorant of a vast amount of what's been happening in the
field of late (and have a terrible memory!). So I would very much like
to draw on other people's knowledge and experience, different
perspectives, even vague intuitions on this. In short, he-elp!

Please reply on-list if it's ok for direct publication (include your
homepage URI if you want quoting), mail me personally if you have
off-the-record comments - if I use I won't mention source. 

The inspiration - last month I had the pleasure of attending a talk by
Ivan Herman entitled "State of the Semantic Web" [2] (apologies Ivan,
the most recent version of your slides I could find online are last
year's at [3], but I think those carry the gist). Great material, but
clearly he was there primarily in his role as semweb lead at the W3C,
though to his credit he went far deeper than mere cheerleading. 

(I too do semweb stuff as a profession, but I'm fortunate enough that
the company I work for encourages speculative exploration - if I
asserted "the semweb sucks!", it'd just lead to further discussion ;-)

Ok, so for this as-yet hypothetical write-up, I'd like to include a few
success stories, as well as an example or two of things that *haven't*
worked. 

Now a few random areas I'd love to hear thoughts on - some of them
involve prognostication, but I'll interpolate backwards (!)...sorry,
lots more bullets than I initially intended - please just pick any that
you feel strongly about! -

* Obviously Semantic Web technologies potentially have a big role within
the corporate Intranet. How are things going there? 
(Personally I'm not comfortable with distinctions between "Public Web"
and er, "HTTP on the LAN" or even "Our Lovely Inference Engine", but for
present purposes I'll keep my mouth shut :-)

* Money! What's the current status of funding for semweb research in
academia? Inside big corps? Gov. orgs? Funding from VCs etc?

* What's the range of application of RDF like nowadays? (Obscure
examples would be nice)

* What is the significance of recent interest in Semantic Technologies
(those without necessarily having any tie to the Web)?

* How far does RDF+SPARQL (+RDFS) get us? Where might OWL(2) take us? Is
there any conflict between these directions?

* How have the Linked Data initiatives changed perceptions in the use of
RDF?

* How's the chicken? How's the egg?
(aside - we seem to have a decent supply of data now - but where are the
UIs/hooks into existing UIs/never-before-considered applications?)

* Has the role of the W3C changed in this context over the past few
years?

* Can we still speak of "The Semantic Web Community" as a (reasonably)
unified whole? Should it be?

* Have the attitudes of the developer community at large changed much
towards the Semantic Web? (Did SWEO help?)

* How has/will blogging influenced the Semantic Web?

* Initially the Web 2.0 'movement' had little or nothing to do with the
Semantic Web (beyond the lower layers of the stack) - is there any
evidence of change there?

* Slightly tangential - where do you see social networking going?
(Possibilities off the top of my head - unification of services; general
loss of interest through another fad coming along; descent into the Web
infrastructure)  
- supplemental: assume the fad prognosis - what'll be next?

* Is there yet any compelling, user-friendly application that is solidly
based on the Semantic Web (and within that definition I'll include
linked data and suchlike broad Web connectivity)?
 - bonus: if I want to show Mom how cool the semweb is, without blinding
her with triples, where do I start?

* Of the old layer cake, we seem to approaching the point where some of
the upper layers don't seem far off being ready for prime time: Rules,
Logic, Proof. Too optimistic?

* Again with the cake: we know we need Trust - but whatever happened to
Signature, Encryption?

* Named graphs are the future?

* (Summary of the last few) - are we done with new specs yet?

* Any impact anticipated from HTML5?

* If there was (is?) a Web 2.0 cake, no doubt it would now include
OpenID and OAuth - how compatible are these/can these be with the semweb
tech we know & love?

* Not unrelated, there's a fair bit of similarity between OpenID
Attribute Exchange and RDF, as well as what appears to be a parallel
stack to the (Semantic) Web with XRDS/XRI/XDI etc. Is independent
invention of this nature a good thing or not? 
(My mouth remains firmly shut :-)

* There's always been a Semantic Web roadmap - has its destination
changed?

* What obstacles are there?

* Event/comm-related things - IM, XMPP, Twitter even - where's the
semweb in all that?

* Mobile Semantic Web - how're we doing?

* Ubiquitous Semantic Web - how're we doing?

* Jim Hendler's question: where are the agents? 

* What are the best next actions to carry this Grand Project (tm)
forward?

* Loose question - while it doesn't make much sense to say when the Web
was/is finished (2 hosts? 2 billion?), but barring disasters, on what
kind of timescale do you think we'll see a significant qualitative
difference in the Web at large due to Semantic Web technologies? 

* Anyone noticed any serendipity recently?

* What questions did I miss? :-)

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/
[2] http://www.semantic-conference.com/session/723/
[3] http://www.w3.org/2007/Talks/0223-Bangalore-IH/ 

-- 
http://dannyayers.com
~
http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/this_weeks_semantic_web/