| This post will feature in Nodalities Magazine, issue 5.

What are the factors that indicate a coming of age? An increased
self-awareness perhaps, or an acceptance and understanding of a broad
range of views, even if they contradict your own? If these factors do
indicate a certain maturity, then I would argue that the International
Semantic Web Conference series has come of age.

Last year’s event in Busan, Korea felt like a watershed moment, with
an increasing focus on practical applications that exploited Semantic
Web technologies, in addition to the highly theoretical papers
typically seen at events of this sort. This year’s conference in
Karlsruhe, Germany, and the seventh in the series overall, maintained
this momentum. But more so than previous years I detected a subtle
change in the mood of the conference. In addition to a tangible sense
of excitement that the Semantic Web was getting ready for the
mainstream, I detected a certain pluralism within the community,
manifested as a greater openness to divergent views and an increase in
attention to topics that might have previously been overlooked.

This willingness to express and accept divergent views was apparent to
me no more so than in the panel titled “An OWL too far?”. This
discussion saw senior members of the Semantic Web community openly
challenge each others views on the proposed second version of OWL, the
Web Ontology Language. Perhaps the views held by the likes of Stefan
Decker, Frank van Harmelen and Ian Horrocks have always been divergent
on this issue, but seeing the differences of opinion aired so openly
was a new experience for me. Far from indicating a damaging lack of
unity in the field, I read this as a clear sign that the community can
engage in open and constructive debate without throwing the toys out
of the pram.

Earlier in the week I had sat on a similarly provocatively titled
panel in the OWL Experiences and Directions workshop – titled “How
might OWL fail?”. As a relative outsider I decided to focus on the OWL
community’s need to improve its marketing and demonstrate its
relevance to the wider world, and expected a degree of hostility to
this message. Instead I sensed a slight deflation at the criticism
that was quickly followed by a desire to engage with the problem and
actively address it.

Perhaps the most powerful sign of how far the Semantic Web community
has come was in the entries to the annual Semantic Web Challenge. This
year the contest had two tracks: the Open Track, which is analogous to
the regular challenge in previous years and has a more established set
of judging criteria; and the Billion Triples Track, an attempt to
stimulate people to generate value from and add value to increasingly
large data sets, with the definition of what constitutes “value” being
more open-ended.

The quality in both tracks was exceptionally high, but one feature
that ran through most of the finalists struck me in particular – the
emphasis on the user experience. Previous challenges have always
attracted user-oriented applications as well as backend technologies,
but this year felt different. Whether the application was supporting
personal aggregation of one’s distributed information, as in the Open
Track winner Paggr; enabling location-oriented browsing of the
Semantic Web on a mobile phone, as in DBpedia Mobile, which took
second place in the Open Track; or providing structured browsing over
billions of RDF triples, as in SemaPlorer, winner of the Billion
Triples Track; the vast majority of entries recognised the need to
both add value to the data *and* provide a compelling user experience
over this.

For me this indicates not just an awareness but an acceptance on the
part of the Semantic Web community that no amount of research and
development at the backend will make a difference if clear user
benefits are not delivered. If this serves as evidence that the ISWC
series has come of age, then I would argue that along with it so has
the Semantic Web community at large. It may have taken some time, but
I have no doubt that this maturity has been earned.