Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

That's where so much of the research action is when it comes to the semantic web, at least these days. It wasn't always that way. The U.S. federal government, through DARPA's (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) DAML (DARPA Agent Markup Language) project, built core technologies underpinning the semantic web, with the help of some $45 million U.S. taxpayer dollars, and in close cooperation with European Union-funded semantic web projects. Thus were what are essentially the standards for the semantic web born, as well as many of its tools, initial ontologies, editors, and so forth.

But DAML's job is to show that something is possible, in this instance "essentially to show that we could treat the web as a database and do it at scale," says Dr. Mark Greaves, one of three DARPA program managers for DAML and is now director of knowledge systems research at Vulcan, Inc., the private investment vehicle for Paul Allen, where he sponsors advanced research in large knowledge bases and advanced web technologies. "Their job is not to fund the sort of massive amounts of development that would be needed to take those basic ideas proven in DAML into commercial reality."

Long-term research is funded by the NSF (National Science Foundation), which has supported a thread of semantic research for a long time, Greaves says. These include such efforts as the Marine Metadata Initiative, TANGO (Table Analysis for Semiautomatic Generation of Ontologies), and Scalable Querying and Mining of Graphs. Larger sources of federal funding are the Defense Department, in service labs such as the army research lab, or the office of naval research.

"So those labs, if they see value for their particular branch of military service, provide lots of money to mature technologies," says Greaves. "That hasn't seemed to happen for the semantic web, so you don't see a lot of defense department R&D and technology maturation money swinging behind the semantic web."

Greaves characterizes the amount of federal funding for the semantic web as modest, guesstimating it to be about $10 to 15 million a year, though he is careful to note that, since he is no longer in federal government service, it is difficult to track this with complete certainty. Contrast that to Europe, where Greave's back-of-the-envelope calculations figure that in the neighborhood of about $50 million Euros a year in public funding from the European Commission gets spent on semantic web research.

In the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Community for research and technological development, which ran 2002 to 2006, Greaves counted 17 semantics-related IT programs. Semantics is, in fact, just a small fraction of what the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research and technological development for the period 2007 to 2013 is spending overall on information and communications technology of all kinds -- over $1 billion dollars a year. "Our government doesn't spend anywhere near that amount," he says. And, Greaves also points out, Europe is the site of two large dedicated multi-site institutes for semantic web research, DERI and the new Semantic Technology Institute International.
Leading semantic web researchers in Europe say they've seen the frustration among their American colleagues when it comes to funding.

"For sure there's far more money in Europe for the semantic web than in the U.S. American researchers tell me all the time that this has probably been true for 2 to 3 years," says Dr. John Domingue, deputy director of the U.K.'s Open University's Knowledge Media Institute, which carries out research related to the creation and sharing of knowledge, with one of its big research topics being the semantic web.

"What I hear from American colleagues is the American funding agencies -- their view is we funded this for a few hundred million dollars, so that's finished and solved, so there's not a big chunk of money there." In contrast, Domingue's group is swimming in it -- he is participating in about five EU projects at the moment, with about $7 million U.S. dollars invested in his lab around his organization's piece of those projects. (In Europe, publicly funded projects are undertaken by consortia that include multiple academic institutions as well as industry partners.)

Nigel Shadbolt, professor of artificial intelligence in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University in the U.K , who led the six-year AKT (Advanced Knowledge Technologies) program in the EU to look at next-generation technologies on the web, suggests one reason why semantic web research may have been pushed to the backburner in terms of U.S. federal funding. "The U.S. has been getting interested in cyber-infrastructures, like grid computing. So I guess we're at one of those rare moments when actually U.K. research spend is going up, and we find ourselves in the unusual situation of perhaps being better served than our U.S. colleagues."

What's equally interesting about this is not just how much money is being spent on both sides of the Atlantic, but how it's being spent. Europe and the U.S. are focused on two different areas, points out Greaves. "The U.S. is looking at the database side. The European side -- the research I track there -- is really on the social and the web side, it's more about web scale stuff, exploiting social networks, dynamic and imperfect ontologies, vs. more centralized and curated ontologies that are more popular in the U.S." That makes sense, when you consider that the European Union, with so many countries, cultures and languages, has to find technologies that will leverage a variety of perspectives. Meantime, the heritage of the semantic web in the U.S. was rooted in the defense arena, and "it's really about what does the military do -- very structured databases and so forth," says Greaves. In Europe, "instead of having extra powerful analytics, they look at simple, scalable imperfect inferences that could operate all over the web, semantically- boosted collaboration, and socially-curated semantic data."

That's an area that has Greaves excited. "Everyone knows a lot about databases and all their problems and strengths. What we don't know a lot about, and what is quite revolutionary, is how large numbers of just ordinary folks, the contributors to Wikipedia, could come together and essentially build an enormous knowledge base without database administrators and tables and SQL and all the trappings of modern databases. What you are trading off is a certain elegance and speed and data cleanliness and so forth -- that's what traditional databases give you -- and what you are getting is massive knowledge that is socially curated and up-to-date, and that is interesting trade-off." .