Gartner says ‘No’ to Semantic Web?
The wonder of RSS alerts mean that I, of course, caught sight of this at the time, but the trials and tribulations of living with someone as they turned six (and the party isn’t until this weekend - will we survive?) pushed it toward the back of my mind. Reading Joe McKendrick today returned my attention to the matter at hand.
Writing in NetworkWorld, Jon Brodkin reports that Gartner are
“…avoiding the temptation to give a new label to the latest technologies such as virtual worlds and the semantic Web, saying they’re not providing the same kind of fundamental change as blogs, wikis and social networking tools.
‘It’s not going to be another era like Web 2.0,’ Phifer said. ‘However, there will be some very interesting innovative things coming out. If you’re in love with numbering schemes, maybe it’s Web 2.1.’”
Aside from obvious comments about the silliness of the point release debate, and the ludicrousness of mungeing ‘virtual worlds’ with the ’semantic Web’, I can’t help feeling that they miss the point. The amalgamation of Semantic Web capabilities with point-in-time technologies such as today’s blogs, wikis, and social networking tools will be far more transformative than that which we’ve seen over the past few years.
As I keep arguing, though, it’s not an either/or type of debate. The participative elements of Web 2.0’s ‘collective intelligence‘ are ripe for taking to a whole new level with the Semantic Web-inspired capabilities of the Talis Platform and related pragmatic instantiations of the Semantic Web dream in the real world.
Maybe Gartner are looking in the wrong places. Might I suggest they spend time talking to one or two of our Advisory Group for a far more informed perspective?
Technorati Tags: Gartner, Semantic Web, Talis, Talis Platform, Talis Platform Advisory Group, Web 2.0, Web 3.0
September 25th, 2007 at 7:29 am
Paul,
I think you made a mistake. Gartner didn’t say “NO” to Semantic Web. What Gartner did say “NO” is Web 3.0. Unless you must make the two terms be equivalent, Gartner really did not reject semantic web.
I totally agree with Gartner’s point that the term “Web 3.0″ is still too early to be assigned to anything, even if it is semantic web. Semantic Web is a grand vision but Web 3.0 would just be a specific stage of World Wide Web. It is very wrong to mix these two things even if it is only for commercial advertisement.
– Yihong
September 25th, 2007 at 7:45 am
Yihong
thanks for your comment, but I’m not sure that I wholly agree.
Web 3.0 could, indeed, be seen as a ’specific stage of the World Wide Web’, and Nova Spivack has been among those to argue so. Indeed, he continues that argument in response to this Gartner pronouncement over on his own blog - http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2007/09/gartner-is-wron.html .
However, my main concern I think was with Gartner’s suggestion that “the semantic Web… [does] not provid[e] the same kind of fundamental change as blogs, wikis and social networking tools”. With *that*, I definitely disagree.
September 25th, 2007 at 10:59 am
I just posted an entry about this very topic, you might find it interesting: http://www.semanticfocus.com/blog/entry/title/where-do-you-stand-on-web-30/
September 25th, 2007 at 11:12 am
Thanks James. I did find your post interesting, and shall comment further on your site…