Over on eFoundations, former colleague Andy Powell offers an interesting post triggered by his reading of position papers for a session today at this week’s JISC CETIS conference here in the UK.

As the session’s abstract describes;

“It is ten years since the W3C released its first working draft on RDF and its Introduction to RDF Metadata. RDF and related standards such as RDFs and OWL are the building blocks which promised to make the vision of the semantic web a reality. A decade on and semantic technologies have been embraced by a wide range of sectors including government, financial services, manufacturing, logistics, transport and communications, energy, health and life sciences, media, and business services. Semantic technologies are widely used to facilitate identity management, language processing, ontology development, knowledge representation, data integration and clustering, information management and ‘meaning extraction.’

Given that semantic technologies have the unique ability to dynamically describe complex and evolving concepts, resources and relationship one would expect these technologies to be highly applicable to the domain of teaching and learning. And yet, to date, the majority of standards, tools and applications which we recognise as ‘educational technologies’ have been heavily based on grammatical approaches such as XML, HTML, etc. Accessible applications, such as those designed to support the development and analysis of conceptual relationships (e.g. mind mapping tools), are not always based on open standards and have not been particularly widely or effectively exploited by the teaching and learning community. To many teaching practitioners semantic technologies have largely remained a peripheral academic interest.”

Lorna Campbell, one of those leading the session, picks up on a point made in David Millard’s position paper, entitling her own blog post on the event,

“The Semantic Web hasn’t failed, it just hasn’t succeeded enough”

Is that true, and what’s success anyway? Talis Platform Advisory Group member Mills Davis is certainly able to point to plenty of success in his recent report on the ’semantic wave’.

The main thrust of Andy’s argument draws upon his experience in the sometimes (often?) frustrating world of consensual standards development, a world in which he has suffered and contributed for many years. He draws upon experiences there, and applies them to the Semantic Web in order to pose questions;

“So, what about the Semantic Web? Well, it suffers from a classic chicken and egg problem. Not enough content is exposed by members of the first group [’those who have content to make available’] in a form suitable for members of the third group [’those that are building tools to put the first two groups in touch with each other’] to develop effective tools for members of the second group [’those who want to discover and use the content provided by others’]. Because the tools don’t exist, the potential benefits of ’semantic’ approaches aren’t fully realised. Members of the second group don’t use the tools because they aren’t felt to be good or comprehensive enough. As a result, members of the first group perceive the costs of exposing richer Semantic Web data to outweigh any possible benefits because of lack of critical mass.”

Hmm. Maybe. There certainly is a problem, but is it this problem? Activities such as the Linking Open Data community project are making large quantities of data available for working with, the necessary licensing frameworks are moving forward apace, and there are a growing number of toolsets with which the sufficiently motivated can get to work and do some interesting things.

The bigger problem today, surely, is one of marketing. Almost no one is really engaging in a conversation that explains and demonstrates the ways in which semantic technologies might improve current applications and make new applications better. Instead, there is an implicit or explicit presumption that the Semantic Web is ’simply’ better… that then descends all too quickly into turgid detail, triples, and ontologies. Where is the compelling story to encourage that break-out from the early adopting zealots into more of a mainstream? Where are the easy small steps that require small changes in current practice, and result in incremental improvement today that opens the door to more tomorrow? Where are the real applications (like our very own Talis Engage) that meet real requirements of real people regardless of whether they want, recognise or understand the Semantic Web underpinnings at all? Where, bluntly, are applications that don’t look scary, turgid, and actively un-designed?

The answer doesn’t have to lie in more standards, in homogenisation, and in institution-spanning top-down frameworks. The answer lies in getting on and solving the real problems that real learners and real researchers really face today… problem by problem and person by person. The right small solution, seeded in the right way, can grow virally and be far more successful than the most high-profile of expensive all-encompassing monoliths. Grow enough, and network effects take over.

Andy concludes with;

“What do I conclude from this? Nothing earth shattering I’m afraid. Simply that for semantic approaches to succeed they will need to be low cost to implement, of high value, and adopted by a critical mass of parties in all parts of the system.”

And with that, I wholeheartedly agree.

Technorati Tags: Andy Powell, cetis, cetis-2007-conference-semantics, Eduserv, Semantic Web, Talis, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

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