Re: web to semantic web : an automated approach

On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 3:08 PM, ravinder thakur
<ravinderthakur@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have been following semantic web for some time now and have seen quite a
> lot of projects being run (dbpedia, FOAF etc) trying to generate some
> semantic content. While these approaches might have been successful in their
> goals, one major problem plaguing semantic web as a whole is the lack of
> semantic content. Unfortunately there is nothing in sight that we can rely
> on to generate semantic content for the truckloads of information being put
> on web everyday. I think one of the _wrong_ assumption in semantic web
> community is that content creators will be creating a semantic data which I
> think is too much for the asking from even more technically sound part of
> web community let along whole of the web community. It hasn't happened over
> last so many years and I don't see it happening in the near future.

Thanks for the thought provoking question Ravinder. I wrote up a
longish response about how we basically need to convince people with
rich domain models (RDBMS, etc) to make their data available on the
web in a particular way. But then I re-read your email and realized
you already knew this :-)

My perspective is that we already see people publishing their data in
machine readable form on the web in vast quantities [1,2]. There is no
lack of semantic data on the web. Although I guess we could go back
and forth for a bit about the semantics of 'semantic' ... which
wouldn't be much fun. The challenge (I think) is in convincing current
and future publishers that there is value in using some patterns from
the semweb community [3, 4].

What sort of stuff does a linked-data space enable? What sorts of
things can you _do_ with a linked data graph that you couldn't do
before? Where are the real, working, non-hypothetical applications I
can play with now that use say the linked-open-data space?. How do we
get people excited enough about these things to invest the time in
making their data assets available in this way on the web? These are
the questions I personally need help with. I already have semantic
data, expressed in databases of various kinds, painstakingly entered
by real people. I need to convince my colleagues that it's a
worthwhile endeavor expressing these semantics on the web using URIs
and RDF.

I think web2.0 has convinced large portions of the software
development and business communities that there _is_ value in making
machine readable data available on the web. But I don't think these
people have yet been convinced that the entities described in this
data need URIs, and that there is value in linking these entities
together within the enterprise and across organizational boundaries.
But it feels like we're close to a tipping point ... perhaps you feel
like we've been on the tipping point for a while eh?

In the end I think the way forward is to continue to add to the list
of success stories [5], to bring semweb technologies to the broader
web developer community [6,7], and to show the synergies between
semweb technologies and other stuff like REST, AtomPub, OpenID,
Microformats, content-management-systems (Drupal, etc). To keep on
keeping on, as it were ... finding new algorithms, building useful
tools and real systems now (as you are)--not giving in to despair, and
retreating to an ivory tower to gaze into the future where the
computers will just take care of it.

//Ed

[1] http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
[2] http://www.programmableweb.com/
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/
[4] http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData
[5] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/
[6] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/
[7] http://www.w3.org/2003/g/data-view

Received on Monday, 20 October 2008 12:13:49 UTC