Where is the Semantic Web Killer App? (Part 1)

NEW YORK -- Recently, I talked to a lot of key VC principals, and they confirmed what I have been suspecting for a while: the Semantic Web (or "Linked Data," "dataweb," etc.) has a credibility problem, to the point of being suggested that it's better to avoid "artificial intelligence," "semantic" keywords in executive summaries, for fear of hitting a disbelief ("the Semantic Web is the future of the web and it will always be" proudly since 2001).

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Coming from me -- a deep believer in a "smarter" web as the future of the Internet and having worked with, and working on a related startup -- this is a pretty big deal, but I think we need the community to focus on the business problem and face the issues in order to solve them. I have thus decided to make this the first topic of what will become a series of posts, because I think the SemWeb community needs to face the challenges coming from the business crowd and address them. I am hoping this will spur a serious debate and work on solving them.

I am a "data geek," a Semantic Web entrepreneur, technologist, and believer. But I don't think solving the Semantic Web credibility issue and designing its "killer app" and consumer success has anything to do with technology. I argue here that it's the lack of business focus and basic ability to answer some simple questions (which non-semantic apps can) that are at the core of the continued lack of realization of even the smallest sign of a killer Semantic Web app.

There are some great startups (Twine, Adaptive Blue, Freebase, Zitgist, and others) that rose in the recent years, surely; there are some technological reasons why adoption has been slow, surely. But at its core, I don't think solving the problem and delivering the vision of a "smarter" web has much to do with the web site owners' laziness in adopting a standard, or the scalability of triple stores, or lack of technical expertise from the part of consumers, clients, funders, etc.

The point is: After more than seven years of promising the Semantic Web deliverance, we still can't get our one-pagers clear. We still can't explain our proposition to users, funders, or anyone else outside the community, what we are building and how it is better than the "dumb" (but increasingly crowd-telligent) and newspaper-ish web of today. That is, we can't do any of the above without needing to dive into a long exhortation into the meanders of technological detail, or without advocating the need to build vertical knowledge bases from the ground up. At which point we lose both the user, and the funder. Not to mention the political factions that exists in the community today between the practical and the purists (more about this in my next post).

One of the best and most succinct presentations of some of the issues comes from Nick Lothian, commenting on Peter Norvig, author of one of the best AI textbooks and director of research at Google. The other commentary I have come across, much more focused on technology issues, is, "The 7 (f)laws of the Semantic Web."

Let me explain what the issue is by linking my personal experience and thinking, in detail. I believe the Semantic Web community sounds a lot like a solution in search of a problem. It is only natural to be so, since the work has been done mostly by technologists, but this has been hampering the ability to generate the "killer app." How so, you will ask, in disbelief? Here are my answers:

"Where's the (business) beef?"

From the point of view of technology, we are almost there: having arisen from the academic community and to a large extent (except implementations in corporate projects) limited to (still) academic projects, Semantic Web projects don't lack a host of technological implementation choices. What we do lack is a consistent business team in every one of these projects. Please enter your content here.