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Are Semantic Researchers Missing the Big Picture?
February 6, 2008 By Jennifer Zaino
As the only large, open, distributed, and dynamic network known to most researchers, the Web provides an excellent example for using semantic technology to enable interoperability on a large scale. But a leading researcher in the field thinks that by focusing primarily on the application of semantics in that arena, the scientific community may be missing the bigger picture.
Dieter Fensel is the president and founder of The Semantic Technology Institute International (STi2), an umbrella organization for research, education, and commercial players around semantic technology. A leading international think tank, the organization started about a year ago with the goal of establishing semantics as a core pillar of modern computer engineering. According to its web site, it is taking the lead in developing new business models and in improving the way people and businesses communicate and interact.
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Fensel’s research focuses around the usage of semantics in 21st century computer science, and his long history in the field includes having held positions at the University of Karlsruhe, the University of Amsterdam, and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, served as Scientific Director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and been an executive member of a number of semantics-related research projects, to name just a few of his past activities.
In January, Fensel published the first STI Technical Report, “Semantic Technology --More than Just an Appendix of the Web,” in which he urges the semantic web community to remember, and act on, the second of the two reasons that has driven it in the direction of the semantic web in the first place.
According to the report, the first reason to apply semantic technology to the web had two parts: 1) because the web needs semantics, because adding tags to text may influence the rendering, retrieval and maintenance of information, and 2) because the web is a perfect dissemination media for semantic technology -- that is, it is useful for semantics, as he writes. But the first reason, where semantics is a means applied to the web, though the more visible one, is more superficial, and may “prove to be a dead end.”
The real challenge, he writes, is “whether it has enough intrinsic innovative potential to enable a successful sustainable scientific and commercial community on a large scale.” This relates to what he says is second and the more principled reason the community began to apply semantics to the web a decade ago: the brittleness of knowledge-based systems and the knowledge acquisition bottleneck that combined to put knowledge technology in a state of crisis. Knowledge was not contextual and reusable, and generating formalized knowledge in niche expert systems could not provide timely ROI. Even solutions (such as the DARPA-funded Knowledge Sharing Effort) still could not achieve meaningful interoperability among niche systems.
Concluding that semantic technology should be applied to big and significant problems, Fensel writes that the biggest and most challenging problem today “is how to interweave all today’s distributed, heterogeneous, and changing implementations into networks of added value. Increased interoperability for large, open, heterogeneous and distributed environments coping with dynamicity is the actual challenge of our time.” And, he writes, “semantics seems to be the only means that can provide scalability for interoperability … That is, scalable interoperability not only requires semantics, but it cannot even be imagined without the usage of semantics.”
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