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21 September 2007
Read/Write Web paints a prettier picture of the Semantic Web
Posted by Paul Miller at September 21, 2007 09:58 AM
Alex Iskold's 'Semantic Web: Difficulties with the Classic Approach' for Read/Write Web was one of the posts rolled up into yesterday's outpouring here on Nodalities.
He's been busy during the (my) night, and I woke this morning to 'Top-Down: A New Approach to the Semantic Web'
There's some good stuff in here, although Alex' opening gambit doesn't gel with my impression of today's Semantic Web, or with the exemplars I pointed to yesterday. Alex writes;
“While the original vision of the layer on top of the current web, which annotates information in a way that is 'understandable' by computers, is compelling; there are technical, scientific and business issues that have been difficult to address.
One of the technical difficulties that we outlined was the bottom-up nature of the classic semantic web approach. Specifically, each web site needs to annotate information in RDF, OWL, etc. in order for computers to be able to 'understand' it.
As things stand today, there is little reason for web site owners to do that. The tools that would leverage the annotated information do not exist and there has not been any clearly articulated business and consumer value. Which means that there is no incentive for the sites to invest money into being compatible with the semantic web of the future.”
The sorts of work that I referred to yesterday, and that Nodalities often discusses, is very much geared towards many attributes of Alex' “Top Down” approach, even if I don't wholly recognise his dividing up of the world of which we're a part...
“But there are alternative approaches. We will argue that a more pragmatic, top-down approach to the semantic web not only makes sense, but is already well on the way toward becoming a reality. Many companies have been leveraging existing, unstructured information to build vertical, semantic services. Unlike the original vision, which is rather academic, these emergent solutions are driven by business and market potential.
In this post, we will look at the solution that we call the top-down approach to the semantic web, because instead of requiring developers to change or augment the web, this approach leverages and builds on top of current web as-is.”
However, it also addresses some of his concerns with his “Top Down”;
“Despite being effective, the somewhat simplistic top-down approach has several problems. First, it is not really the semantic web as it is defined, instead its a group of semantic web services and applications that create utility by leveraging simple semantics. So the proponents of the classic approach would protest and they would be right. Another issue is that these services do not always get semantics right because of ambiguities. Because the recognition is algorithmic and not based on an underlying RDF representation, it is not perfect”
As with so many other areas, the path forward lies in the middle, somewhere between the extremes typified by Alex' Top Down and Bottom Up. Neither is sustainable or effective in the long term, and I doubt that any of the companies or products that he places in each bucket would consider themselves as staying there; even if they recognise that description of themselves as accurate today.
Yes, we're seeing quite narrow verticals adopting semantically-assisted approaches to delivering a patently better service. But to have the silos grow better at the same time as they grow more absorbing and sticky is not necessarily a good thing for the end user. As Danny suggests in comments, we need to move from 'on the web' to 'of the web'...
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» Mashups in the Middle - Bridging the Gap to the Semantic Web from Aqua Regia
Yesterday brought an enlightening post by Alex Iskold, entitled “Top-Down: A New Approach to the Semantic Web“:
“While the original vision of the semantic web is grandiose and inspiring in practice it has been difficult to achieve bec... [Read More]
Tracked on September 21, 2007 05:12 PM
