Today I read two really interesting blog posts about RDF, ontologies and the Semantic Web. I’ll start with Daniel Lemire’s Do not ask me to be a keynote speaker on ontologies and inference engines. In his article, Daniel said:
“Before I become interested in anything that has to do with web ontologies, I need to be convinced that, at least, RDF is a useful idea. So, first take Tim Bray’s RDF challenge:
“To the first person or organization that presents me with an RDF-based app that I actually want to use on a regular basis (at least once per day), and which has the potential to spread virally, I hereby promise to sign over the domain name RDF.net.”
But see, the rdf.net domain name is still down. Tim Bray, who can be seen as one of the initiators and early promoters of RDF, is still waiting for a useful RDF application. So am I.”
The challenge is not an easy one, but I don’t think it is an impossible one. After all, “Things are only impossible until they’re not”. As we will see later in this article, things are changing and such an application could be possible in a somewhat near future. At least, me and many other people are working toward that goal.
Semantic Web based research isn’t working
After that, I read Ingrid Und Leo’s blog post: quote: semantic web based research isn’t working
“1. Researchers need to stop thinking of themselves as researchers and start thinking of themselves as implementors.
2. Research institutes need to join forces with emerging businesses looking to adopt semantic technology. This breaks the current model of business / research institute collaboration since startups do not have money to contribute to fund research, but tough noogies.
3. Researchers need to build their tools in real-world development environments, i.e. as modules for LAMP web-publishing tools such as Drupal and WordPress. They need to find more organizational partners to deploy their solutions. They need to do something other than build widgets.”
Update 18-09-2006: A much better answer from Harry Chen: Struggling with the Semantic Web
From researchers to implementers
At the best of my knowledge, I totally agree with both articles.
The proof that both RDF and web ontologies are useful is yet to be done.
The good news is that that RDF “researchers” are becoming more and more RDF “implementers”. If I base my observations on the SIOC ontology development team, I can see that all the improvements to the ontology are made after implementations of the ontology into blogging softwares like WordPress or in community portals like Talk Digger or ODS and also with its interaction with other ontologies like FOAF, DC, etc.
They also work hard to push SIOC’s adoption by content creators around the Web. Right now, they developed exporter plugins for blogging systems, I implemented the SIOC ontology in Talk Digger, OpenLinks implemented the SIOC ontology in their ODS solution, I created a pinging system to aggregate and export RDF files to crawlers and software agents, and much more stuff have been done as John Breslin enumerate on his blog.
So, as you can see, the biggest part of their work is not as researchers, but as implementers.
The landscape is changing.
The landscape of the Semantic Web is changing. We are currently at a crucial moment in the Semantic Web’s development: from an academic goodie to a commercial venture.
More and more web developers and companies start to see how all these technologies and techniques could increase the power of their software, their infrastructure, etc. The problem is that they hadn’t the data to play with. It was impossible for them to justify such an investment considering that there were not any structured data (RDF) available on the Web.
Everything is changing, and everything should explode… soon!
Everything is in place; we had to have a context in place before hoping to see the semantic web appearing on the Internet. We had to reach a critical mass of RDF data, so people would see the need to start developing applications using that structured data. But we also had to reach a critical mass of applications so people would see the need to export their content in RDF. You see the pattern? We need both to see both happening.
Early adopters
The only hope we have is to get a critical mass of early adopters, and it is what we are slowly reaching. The early adopters will create applications, ontologies and data. According to Swoogle, they already aggregated about 1.7 millions of RDF documents. Ping the Semantic Web reached 32 000 in less than a month, without crawling the Web as Swoogle does. All these stats and projects tell me that we can hope to see real semantic web applications in a near future.
The Semantic Web Revisited
After writing this article, I checked my list of things to read. An item I put in my list about two months ago has attracted my attention. Harry Chen wrote about the The Semantic Web Revisited article. Read this article to know at which milestone the Semantic Web currently is. It covers all the topics around the Semantic Web, and some of them, like the importance of early adopters to help the Semantic Web to be widely adopted, are in direct relation with what I said in that article.
Technorati: Semantic | web | revised | adopters | data | science |
Bob DuCharme
September 18, 2006 — 8:42 am
“We had to reach a critical mass of RDF data…According to Swoogle, they already aggregated about 1.5 millions of RDF documents.” Big gap there. A huge proportion of Swoogle, maybe even more than half, is ontologies, and many of those are “ontologies for the sake of ontologies,” to quote Dan Connolly referring to a conference he attended: ontologies with no corresponding data. (More on this here.) People just aren’t that interested in creating RDF data. I gave up looking for entries to add to rdfdata.org when 40 minutes of searching for new RDF each day, accompanied by various scripts using Google’s API, was only turning up files from two-year-old homework assignments. Tools to treat existing data as triples seem like the hope of the “semantic web” for now.
Fred
September 18, 2006 — 9:36 am
Hi Mr. DuCharme,
I edited this post, but it seems I forgot to save what I edited. It is not 1.5 but 1.7 millions (check the link) and according to Mr. Finin:
“To answer these questions, we first have to decide what we are counting. While Swoogle has found over 1.7M Semantic Web documents and more than 70K of these define some terms, we consider fewer than 1% to be ontologies. Moreover, we can observe considerable variation in the way ontologies are defined and evolve. Many ontologies are constructed and maintained collaboratively, like a Wiki. Design tradeoffs also vary, with some large comprehensive ontologies like CYC and other small and modest vocabularies like FOAF.”
It seems that only 1% (70k) of the documents are ontologies. Okay, I said “only” but 70k ontologies is far too much in my humble opition.
However, the SW will certainly not start with 70k different ontologies, but probably with few, specific and well defined ontologies, like DC, FOAF, SIOC, DOAP, etc. (there I am talking about the adoption of the SW for general, day-to-day applications, and not for specific fields like medicine, genomic, etc.
But personally, I think we reached a first step with RSS content. In 6 years or so, it started from nothing and now hundred of RSS readers have been developed, most of the big web sites export their data using it. So I think that it could be done: people will eventually understand why they should care about exporting their data using ontologies. Six years ago, people asked the same question: why should I export my data in RSS? Now they know: they want to crawled by Technorati, they want to build a readership, etc.
What is good with RSS (and other syndication format) is that it teached to people why they should care about freely exporting their content in a format easily processable by computers. Now, we have to extent this to other ontologies.
Thanks for commenting this blog post!
Take care,
Salutations,
Fred