To paraphrase the immortal words of Ferris Bueller, the World Wide Web moves moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.
If you haven't been looking around lately, you might just miss the next evolutionary stage of the Web — the Semantic Web or Linked Data movement promises to change the way software developers, enterprises and consumers interact with data.
The technology driving the Semantic Web and Linked Data will be on display on June 17 -18 at the LinkedData Planet conference in New York. "The adoption by business of semantics technology is producing a new generation of applications, sometimes known as Web 3.0 and Enterprise 2.0," said Ken North, co-chair for the conference.
North said that the lineup of speakers at LinkedData Planet reflects the conference theme: the confluence of Web and enterprise computing.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the director of the World Wide Web Consortium and the man who introduced the concept of the Semantic Web several years ago, will deliver one of the conference's keynote addresses.
Other speakers include Berners-Lee's colleagues Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor James Hendler and OpenLink Software CEO Kingsley Idehen, who North called a thought leader of the Linked Data movement. North said Hendler, Idehen and others have advocated linking data as an important step in evolving the Web - a process of moving from a web of linked documents to a web of linked data.
To get a better perspective of where thing are heading with the Semantic Web and Linked Data movements, we posed questions about standards and adoption to Hendler and Idehen.
Q. Given that the Semantic Web is largely based on participants adhering to standards, do you think the standard bodies (such as W3C and IETF) are keeping pace with companies and developers?
James Hendler: I'm not sure I agree with this at all: The Semantic Web isn't defined by the standards, the standards follow the work in the field. The 2001 Scientific American article on the Semantic Web ([which] Tim Berners-Lee, Ora Lassila and I wrote) came out several years before the first standards.
That said, the standards bodies don't have the job to lead, their job is to provide a forum for companies to agree on what they need for interoperability. The set of standards maintained by the W3C Semantic Web [...] has been growing quite fast, with GRDDL, RDFa, SPARQL and others coming along.
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"Linked Data allows us to look at data from a range of perspectives, by peeling back the containment of a Web site, Web page, database, or database table. It sets the records free, by bringing the entities that records represent to life."
— Kingsley Idehen |
Kingsley Idehen: Yes [they are keeping pace]. In actual fact they [the standard bodies] are ahead most of the time.
The Semantic Web is an example of the standardization process being way ahead of the roadmaps of companies and developers.
Q. Are the standard bodies adequately responsive to real-world needs?
James Hendler: I think so. Recall that they are a consortia driven by the needs of their members.
Kingsley Idehen: Very much so. I do sometimes wonder if companies are adequately responsive to the emergence and evolution of standards, though.
Q. Are they doing a good job of educating content producers and software developers about standards? That is, will the standards help drive the technology or will the technology drive the standards at this point?
James Hendler: That is not really the job of a standards [consortium]. Their job is to do enough education to get things going. The successful standards generate enough interest to be picked up by the educational market in things like O'Reilly books, books on ideas (like the recent "Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist").
Kingsley Idehen: Usage patterns, in response to the quest for value, trigger the evolution of technology. Of course, the evolution of technology then triggers the need for standardization.
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"When people first started to learn about the Web, they needed to learn about "hyperlinks" and "markup." Web 2.0 developers have to learn about Ajax, services and social network mathematics. Should Web 3.0 be any different?"
— James Hendler |
Q. Is commercial consideration of good SEO driving content producers to follow better practices in terms of their markup, too. That is, is Google having an educational benefit by virtue of rewarding good markup and more structured data?
James Hendler: Google is not yet talking in public about work with the Semantic Web and these particular approaches to metadata. The smaller companies playing in areas like Semantic Search are showing real potential, and some of the other large companies, that compete with Google are exploring the space (with rumors of buyouts and takeovers afloat).
Remember, at this point, we're primarily talking about data interoperability and not search, and the large data companies (Oracle, IBM and Microsoft) all have people and products in this space.
Kingsley Idehen: No. I don't put Google-induced SEO in the same bucket as the constructive addition of structure to the Web. Put differently, Google-induced SEO optimizations reduce the ability to serendipitously discover relevant things on the Web.
Q. When someone interested in exploring the Semantic Web first starts looking around, he or she might find himself/herself facing a collection of unfamiliar technologies that seem to make it harder to produce "good" content and that concern themselves with unfamiliar concepts like "ontologies" and "knowledge domains."
James Hendler: When people first started to learn about the Web they, needed to learn about "hyperlinks" and "markup." Web 2.0 developers have to learn about Ajax, services, and social network mathematics. Each new Web technology brings new things with it and the leading developers push these forward, with others learning after. Should Web 3.0 be any different?
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