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Image: “Rex - Gone Fishing” by snuzzy via flickr Creative Commons, “By 2.0″

It must be a sign of the times when the most informative Semantic Web overview I’ve read in a long time has not come from a semweb company, nor from a Linked Data initiative or an academic or technologist’s personal blog. Rather, PricewaterhouseCoopers—massive, international professional services firm—has set a new standard in Semantic Web publications by covering it exclusively in their Technology Forecast, 2009. They must think there is some future in the Linked Data web.

Calling on firms and governments to open up data has been a thankless but far from fruitless task. Talis has funded work on the Public Domain Dedication and Licence, and many in science and academia make eloquent cases for open access to public data. PwC’s Tech Forecast not only predicts and calls for more linked and open data, but makes one hell of a business case for the future of the Semantic Web. The technology overview, instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with the Semantic Web, carries a deeper dimension to firms and the enterprise world itself.

Relational databases do not scale:

Relational data models never were intended for integration at the scale enterprises now need. Relational data management soaks up IT resources that should be dedicated elsewhere. Plus, traditional databases create silos because relational data are specific to the database system implementation.

Linking up your data with the rest of the world frees it to be used:

Their future business agility will depend on their ability to focus on techniques that optimize sharing rather than maintaining silos. That’s why a standardsbased approach makes sense. In a digital ecosystem, the assets of others can benefit you directly, and vice versa. It’s about supply and demand.

Riding the wave linked data generates means you can’t control everything—but you knew that already:

Enterprises need control over some data, but not all data. Many enterprises have learned that data warehousing doesn’t scale to encompass all corporate data. … Limit the data warehouse to data management problems that align with its attention to detail, its connection to transaction systems, and for problems that need such heavy investments.

Following this overview (which also managed to quickly and comprehensively cover ontologies) are some telling interviews with some enterprises who have made the leap to RDF already. Tom Scott discussed the BBC’s story, and answered specific questions about linked data at bbc.co.uk/programmes (also covered by Tom in Nodalities Magazine).

I was pleased to note that Talis got a mention in a sample list of vendors, and the authors of the Forecast also made use of several Talis-produced resources, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s interview with Paul Miller.

It’s a big step, this. This is a professional services firm “getting” the Semantic Web. This is PricewaterhouseCoopers predicting the rise and use of the Linked Data in 2009. This is a call to enterprises to get their data in order.

Or, really, just to open up their data and let the whole community worry about the order.

image: “Order vs. Chaos”, Ivan Makarov (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivanomak/446763022/) via flickr

With the unveiling of Google’s RDFa support and discussions from the UK’s Central Office of Information around using RDFa in their job sites, there has certainly been a lot of coverage of RDFa and Linked Data over the past few days.

Google’s announcement feels a bit limp, hidden as it is in the webmasters’ tools. To read their own description of “Rich Snippets,” you’d think they were little more than an additional piece in the armory of SEO’s and content editors, giving them the ability to flag reviews and products on their pages. The real excitement, as Tim O’Reilly mentioned, is that this is Google’s first active support for explicit information. A site can now state: “We give this widget 4 stars out of 5, it costs £100, and our CEO is Joe Bloggs.” That’s fantastic!

I wonder if we tend to miss the importance of explicit statements, because we default to googleing for something and hoping the first page or so of results will contain the answer. I can very swiftly find “reviews” for a Logitech Mouse, for example; but I still have to go through the reviews and find what they said. I might be lucky if Google shows me the result within the site description, but I’m much more likely to need to follow my own lead after Google serves me up a bunch of links to follow. This lets sites explicitely surface an (admittedly currently woefully limited) amount of their own data. It makes much more sense for finding what you’re actually after without needing to disambiguate yourself. It feels like a step in the right direction. It leaves me personally wishing Google would open it right out and support full vocabularies, but I’m glad for this initial offering.

Alongside Google, the Central Office of Information seems to be taking a much more webby approach to Linked Data, by supporting FoaF and other public vocabularies. Mark Birbeck explains:

To facilitate this we set up an open source project called argot-hub, with a wiki, issue-tracking system and associated discussion lists.

The first vocabularies — or argots — that I defined were for job vacancies, but in order to make the terminology usable in other situations, I broke out argots for replying to the vacancy, the specification of contact details, location information, and so on.

An argot doesn’t necessarily involve the creation of new terms, and in fact most of the argots use terms from Dublin Core, FOAF and vCard. So although new terms have been created if they are needed, the main idea behind an argot is to collect together terms from various vocabularies that suit a particular purpose.

The first pages to support the RDFa information will be vacancy notices, which can be seen at the Civil Service home page. The great thing about this is that it’s supporting application information retrieval. An application can query the site, pull out explicit information, and voila: You’re very own “what jobs are available in the Civil Service” app. Looking at all the info there, you could have a field day, sorting by salary, area of interest or whatever.

So, two very different use cases for the Semantic Web via RDFa. What’s next?

So, we’ve all heard of the Semantic Web. It’s been covered by BBC Radio 4 in the morning, it’s been in mainstream press and the blogosphere for years before that. You’re reading Nodalities, probably because you are particularly interested in the future of a connected data web.

But how much does the rest of the world know? How much do the thinkers and movers in the corporate world know about it? A recent survey by the Semantic Web Company seems to suggest that the Semantic Web is slowly coming into focus for the wider world. The study found that the participants had a high familiarity with the notions of the Semantic Web (and “Social Software”), and that developers who took part considered semantic web technologies to be relevant to their future development.

Interestingly, you can come to your own conclusions on the survey results, because they’ve made their data available (SPSS) for download. You can either read their report, or download the dataset and run your own stats.

I’d be very interested to know if anyone does run their own analysis. I’m afraid I’ll be taking their word for it at present, because I left the world of SPSS behind with quantitative linguistic analysis at university!

Following our recent announcement of the Talis Connected Commons, there has been some significant coverage in the blogosphere. I’ll list a few of the links I’ve seen here, and if you’ve come across others, or have covered the Connected Commons yourself, please share in the comments.

Read Write Web

Marshall Kirkpatrick captured some of the Linked Data future vision with his timely coverage over on Read Write Web. Marshall’s coverage sets the stage for potentials and takes a very much forward-looking view on the Connected Commons.

Science Commons

With Talis’ use of the Creative Commons CC0 License as one route for the Connected Commons data licensing, the Science Commons blog has made reference to the scheme. I quote: “We commend Talis for using CC0 as a means to clearly mark and identify public domain data, and look forward to see what fruit this tree will bring for the open data / linked data communities.”

Unilever Cambridge Centre for Molecular Informatics

“We’ll certainly be taking this up.”

bbgm by Deepak Singh

“We are living in a world where data sharing, data access, and open data in general are getting more and more important, and available.”

The Content Guy

“That last bit is what has Mike and me interested - finding new ways of making use of the relationships between data and content that all the various semantic tools unearth.”

Open Knowledge Foundation

Again, if you have something to say on your own blog, or have come across more coverage of Connected Commons, drop it in the comments.

I’m sure I’m introducing old friends; but Twitter is a “microbloggiing” platform, to give it its proper description. It gives users 140 characters to publish status updates, comments, gripes, complaints, praises, news and whatever comes to mind. It’s burst out of its original answer to the simple question: “What are you doing?” and users often tweet just about everything.

One interesting innovation is the integration of the hashtag: simply a hash symbol (#) and a tag descriptor for the comment. This gives people the ability to follow particular threads of updates or participate in conversations around an interest. They’re often used, for example, to update the goings on from conferences (#FOWA for example). People give their own content this little bit of information, and a search engine can find them. People can add additional information and follow conventions which allow for distributed trends that anyone can follow and interact with.

The recent snowfall in Britain gave rise to a flurry of tweets about road closures, amounts of snow falling, schools closing down and all the other chaos unleashed. When users followed a simple convention, however, this information got organised. People quickly adopted the #uksnow hashtag to track the topic; and eventually someone worked out a way to capture all the info needed to follow these geographically. By tweeting the first half of a UK post code plus a rating out of ten snow falling, anyone following the thread knows exactly where it’s snowing and how much is coming down. It’s like an instant weather polling station, distributed across the country. It can go a step further, however, when services can actually mashup these tweets when users turn their simple status updates into a mini line of code.

This little bit of information allows for people to write software to track and automate the twitter information. This interactive map from benmarsh.co.uk, for example, actually plots a visual graph of snowfall across Britain. Bigger snowflakes indicate larger numbers out of ten in the poll. It’s simple, really. Ingenious, possibly. But the fundamental distinction between this tracking ability and the noise of thousands of Twits shouting about the snow is that little bit of #metadata.

So, is this use of twitter a metaphor for the Semantic Web? It’s certainly a picture of automating information flow using metadata via software. Sounds Semanticcy to me.

Here at Talis, we’re pretty big on the idea of Linked Data. It’s one of the key features of the Semantic Web vision, the idea that data are interconnected so man and machine can “follow their noses” to find new or relevant information. It’s also key to the idea of the “Web of Data” in which all published, online information can become part of a massive, usable database. An important element in seeing this become a reality is the notion of discoverability.

I remember, maybe ten years ago, someone explained that the World Wide Web contains so much information, that I’d be unlikely to find the “best” answer to my question. Of course, search engines have changed this, to such an extent that we “google” for information with a fair certainty that we’ll find what we’re after—or something closely related. If I want to find out about plane tickets to Boston, Massachusetts, i’d be unlikely to want to read about someone complaining about theatre tickets in Boston, Lincolnshire. Search engines made it possible to discover the right information that we’re after. Search engines, however, can only go so far in their ability to find information, because they’re looking at keywords within the documents they scan. They can’t identify many kinds of data, nor can they make use of them: they just point.

Fast-forward now to surfing the Semantic Web. Part of what makes the whole thing great is that the information (data) we’re after on the Semantic Web comes with its own information about what it is (metadata). So, I can know with an even greater degree of certainty, that the info I’ve found is what I’m after. It’s like finding a book in the Library. If we’re looking to borrow a particular book about the Battle of Hastings, for example, we probably don’t settle for the first one we come across in the catalogue. We look for the book we’re after, and know when we find it because it’s record identifies it to us. When we know what data is (and our software can be told what kind of data we’re looking at, and what’s in it), we can start to make use of these vast published datasets.

The authors of the voiD vocabulary are looking to make this metadata more relevant by providing data publishers with tools that describe their particular collection of data (dataset). It gives each dataset the ability to describe itself saying what topic it’s covering, what kind of data it comprises, numerical information about the data et cetera. voiD co-author Keith Alexander told me earlier: “It’s a way of saying “I have this dataset, this is what it’s all about, come and use it!”

You can find out more about the voiD vocabulary over on its site: http://rdfs.org/ns/void. The authors have gone a step further, however, and written a manual to make voiD that much easier to implement: http://rdfs.org/ns/void-guide. They’d appreciate feedback, too, so if you can think of a way to improve voiD or the guide, give them a ping at: void-rdfs-internals@googlegroups.com

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