I’ve been a long-time reader of Stephen Downes‘ OLDaily, but had never really noticed his Half an Hour site. I’m therefore grateful to my colleague, Nad, for bringing a recent post from that site to my attention. Stephen subsequently linked to the post himself, from the 21 March OLDaily, as Slashdot sat up and took notice;

“Maybe I should have given it a different title - but sheesh, someone has to say it. Here is the central idea: ‘The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating.’ Readers might not like the examples that were top-of-mind last night (or my peeved state about Yahoo killing my Flickr account) but readers of this newsletter have over the last seven years seen an unending list of examples.”

(my emphasis)

Stephen’s premise, then, is that the commercial sector’s natural tendencies to compete, to differentiate, and to shaft the competition make them incapable of co-operating on getting the pieces in place for a Semantic Web such as that envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee et al in that oft-cited Scientific American piece.

Stephen writes;

“The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating.

We are talking about the most conservative bunch of people in the world, people who believe in greed and cut-throat business ethics. People who would steal one another’s property if it weren’t nailed down. People like, well, Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch.

And they’re all going to play nice and create one seamless Semantic Web that will work between companies - competing entities choreographic their responses so they can work together to grant you a seamless experience?

Not a chance.”

What a balanced view of the commercial sector…

It gets worse;

“The future is not in the Semantic Web (or in Java, or in enterprise computing - all for the same reason). Careers based on that premise will founder. Because the people saying all the semantic-webbish things - speak the same language, standardize your work, orchestrate the services - are the people who will shut down the pipes, change the standards, and look out for their own interests (at the expense of yours).

I don’t trust any of them. Not even as far as I could throw them. Because I know they’d sell me down the river in a minute, if it meant one iota of business advantage. You know this too.”

Leaving aside, for a moment, the fact that even proto-members of the evil commercial sector made a perfectly adequate job of (eventually) agreeing such things as voltage, current, power grids, communications network frequencies and more, I have a little more faith than Stephen appears to in a market’s ability to innovate effectively, to compete forcefully, and to recognise the point at which the previously differentiating becomes commodity; the point at which being different stops being an asset and starts being a liability.

To be fair, some of the more idealistic components of that early semantic web vision are a long way from the reality being built on the ground by the likes of Radar Networks, Metaweb, ourselves here at Talis, Garlik, Segala and more. The ‘one true ontology’, if it ever received serious consideration, is nowhere to be seen, and the modern reality is one based upon pragmatism, sound and scalable technology for manipulating data, and a recognition that very different value propositions must be made and managed within and between participating organisations.

Rather than setting out to engineer Utopia, those active today in deploying the technologies of the semantic web are working with what they find, and assisting existing applications to open up, to become truly enmeshed within the architecture of the web, and to add value by leveraging resources from across a range of repositories.

Yahoo!/Flickr with their username silliness, and Google with its api realignment, are not the semantic web, but nor did they claim to be. A broader set of trends, such as the rise of utility computing and increased recognition of the value of open data (whether personal clickstream, the output of scholarly publishing, state-funded geospatial data, or whatever) fall squarely within the realm of taking the semantic web mainstream. These are as important - if not more so - as W3C’s efforts around RDF, OWL etc. However unfortunate the label, perhaps the current enthusiasm (from the outside, predominantly) for calling this intersection of Web 2.0 exuberance and Semantic Web science ‘Web 3.0‘ has some differentiating value.

The current generation of Web 2.0 darlings might have a tendency to lock their data down, merely exposing it via their own widgets, blog plugins, and other sticky applets. The current generation of Semantic Web discourse, too, may have a tendency to be overly exact, purist, and disconnected from the realities of actual implementation outside the laboratory. Both of these (exaggerated) ‘facts’ are shifting, though. There is a recognition, for example, as Eric Schmidt has been amongst those saying, that data must be more freely exchanged;

“The more we can, for example, let users move their data around, never trap the data of an end-user, let them move it if they don’t like us, the better.”

There is no reason whatsoever for interconnecting Webs of Data to be beyond our short-term reach. There is no reason for fiercely competing companies not to recognise the value in gaining access to low-level data and functions that also benefit their competitors; and for all of them to simply move the competition to a new level, based upon the latest iteration in commoditisation of the data with which they previously differentiated. This doesn’t require some grand and magnanimous multi-party agreement. It simply requires early adopters (Metaweb’s Freebase being one good example, but there will be more) to get out and to do it. None of the incumbent services that they challenge present insurmountable switching costs to their users, and they will simply face a business decision as to whether they adapt… or become irrelevant.

Why not come and talk to us? See what can be done, and help progress to the next stage in the journey. All-encompassing Semantic Web? No. Pragmatic and useful unlocking of the Web of Data? Oh yes.

CC-licensed pic by Stuart Yeates.

Technorati Tags: Participation, Platforms, Garlik, Radar Networks, Segala, Semantic Web, slashdot, Stephen Downes, Talis, Talis Platform, Web 3.0

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