It’s been a busy couple of months for the Semantic Web research community. At the very end of May the European Semantic Web Conference
returned to Crete, where the series began in 2004. Now in its sixth year the conference reflected the vibrancy of the research community
in this area, the progress made to date, and the increased emphasis on deployment and uptake of Semantic Web technologies. The latter aspect
was noticeable in many parts of the conference, not least of which in the Semantic Web In Use track, a new addition to the ESWC series, co-chaired by Talis Researcher Tom Heath.

With adoption of Semantic Web technologies and Linked Data principles increasingly rapidly, many members of the research community met in
late June at Schloss Dagstuhl in Germany for a seminar titled “Semantic Web: Reflections and Future Directions”. Almost ten years since the first Dagstuhl seminar on the Semantic Web the goal of this event was to learn lessons from the past and map out the research agenda for the next ten years of the field. Again acknowledging the practical aspects of the field, there were lengthy and productive discussions on the topics of hosting and persistence of RDF vocabularies, and the urgent need to examine how Linked Data and the Semantic Web can enhance Human-Computer Interaction; both of which are topics close to our hearts at Talis.

The natural question that arises from exploring the next ten years of research in any field is “who’s going to do all the work?” Fortunately
in early July the Seventh Summer School on Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web took place in Cercedilla, Spain, part-sponsored by
Talis. This annual event, directed by Enrico Motta (The Open University) and Asun Gomez Perez (Univ. Politécnica de Madrid), provides over 50 students from Europe and beyond with lectures, invited talks and group projects in cutting edge areas of the Semantic Web field, supported by a team of leading researchers. In addition to the knowledge gained from this intense week of study, students of the summer school get to network with their peers and build the very community that will drive forward the Semantic Web research agenda over the next ten years.

| 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.

No, these aren’t the necessary precursors for a conspiracy theory about the moon landings, but three of the topics touched upon at the first VoCamp, which took place recently in Oxford. VoCamps are events where motivated individuals can come together and spend some dedicated time creating vocabularies/ontologies for describing data on the Web.

You may have heard of these vocabulary things before. Two popular examples that have been around for some time and are in widespread usage are FOAF (as in Friend of a Friend), for describing people and who they know, and SIOC, for describing the contents of ‘social media’ sites such as blogs and discussion fora. But why do we need more vocabularies, and why do we need VoCamps?

We need more vocabularies because people are increasingly motivated to share their data online, and need some way of describing the data itself in a structured fashion. If people use the same vocabularies when describing data of the same type, or at least some of the same terms, it makes sharing and integrating those data sets much easier. For example, imagine you and I both run online shops selling sports equipment, and we want to describe the stock we hold, if we use the same vocabulary to describe that stock data then anyone wanting to cross search our two shops will benefit by not having to map my data structure to yours — we’ll have saved them the job by converging on the same vocabulary from day one.

At this point in time there just aren’t enough vocabularies around to describe the wealth of data in the world. Left to their own devices people will simply create ad-hoc vocabularies which do little to aid data sharing. It’s for these reasons that we need VoCamps, where people can put day-to-day distractions to one side and concentrate on creating technically sound vocabularies in domains that interest them, according to some of the best practices in the field.

VoCampOxford2008 was the start of this process. I used the time to work with Ian and others on a vocabulary/ontology for describing Whisky. Leigh created his Space Flight vocabulary — not just a flippant bit of fun, but a crucial component in his desire to make NASA data more widely accessible and easily archived. Other groups at VoCampOxford2008 worked on a vocabularies for describing IRC discussions, evidence, discourse, participation, votes, journeys and scientific data. See this page for more information on the vocabs we created.

Now, while some people would no doubt argue that whisky and space flight constitute the two most important topics around, there’s still some way to go in creating the rich ecosystem of vocabularies required for a Web of data. That’s why the second VoCamp will take place in Galway, Ireland in late November. Anyone interested in getting their hands (metaphorically) dirty and creating some vocabs should register now before the event fills up — it’s free. Given the location I’ll have to spend a little time in Galway refining the Whisky ontology, but no doubt there’ll be plenty of scope for creating vocabularies in other areas. I may even attempt a vocabulary for describing conspiracy theories, but I imagine that no-one would be able to agree on the details!

A significant slice of the Linked Data/Semantic Web community will be gathering next week in New York City for the first Linked Data Planet conference. The programme is packed full of talks from experts in the field, including keynotes from Tim Berners-Lee, Kingsley Idehen and our very own Ian Davis. As sponsors of the conference we have a small number of free passes to give away. The passes give access to the full conference (not just the exhibition hall and keynotes), but do not include travel, accommodation or meals etc – these will need to be covered by the recipients of the free passes. So, if you can make it to NYC next week and would like to have a chance of winning a free pass to this groundbreaking event, just email Paul Miller (firstname.surname at talis.com) with the words “Linked Data Planet passes” in the subject line. The free passes will be given out on a first-come, first-served basis. Good luck, and hope to see you in New York next week!