Along with many of you, I received the call for papers for the 4th European Semantic Web Conference in my email this morning.

Nothing unusual about that, you may think, and you’d be right. The world is full of academic conferences issuing calls ahead of the event, soliciting submissions of ‘scholarly’ papers, reviewing those, and then printing a subset of them in some worthy journal bound to grace the shelves of many a university library. So far, so good, and the wheels of research keep on turning.

The thought that occurred to me as I read the call, though, was that the organisers kept stating their desire to see submissions from ‘industry’. For example;

“We particularly encourage the submission of papers on industrial efforts and experiences with Semantic Web projects.”

There are plenty of examples of big companies such as IBM, HP or BT that maintain well-resourced research groups and encourage them to engage with academic processes and ways of working, but how much of the innovation we all need to know about is actually happening in far smaller organisations such as my own? How many of those smaller organisations can seriously look to invest the effort in writing lengthy papers on their real-world implementations of the Semantic Web so far ahead of the date on which they may – or may not – be invited to speak? The conference poster session is little better; one of many crammed into a room, trying to attract the attention of delegates more intent on their coffee, discussing the last presentation they saw, or catching up with friends they haven’t seen since last year’s event? The barrier isn’t the preparation and delivery of a compelling, engaging and informative plenary presentation. The barrier is the hurdle of the printed paper, and the requirement that it be delivered so far ahead of time for ‘publication’ in a locked box to which neither your employer nor your peers are likely to subscribe.

To compare Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web is perhaps not a wholly fair mixing of apples with oranges, but I am tempted to pose the question anyway. To what extent, then, has the far more rapid and public adoption of ‘Web 2.0 technologies’ been because of the far less onerous process of sharing the state of the art with one’s peers? Someone issues a call for expressions of interest. You respond with an abstract. That abstract is accepted or not. You prepare and deliver a presentation, and make that freely available for anyone to see on the Web. The conversation moves forward on blogs, wikis, mailing lists and the other channels so often used, and barriers to entry are (relatively) low.

There is undoubtedly a place for the scholarly process, and academic conferences. The letters in front of my name testify to my past engagement with that, and the Semantic Web is certainly an area ripe for lengthy academic discourse. There’s also a place for nimble, accessible, and open; for good enough as well as for unanimous consensus atop rigourous theoretical construct.

Can the Semantic Web, and the events at which it moves forward, straddle that particular divide? Is ESWC a place to build a better bridge?

This image of Innsbruck is by Junichi Azuma, shared on Flickr with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial licence.

Technorati Tags: eswc2007, eswc07, Semantic Web, Talis