New Year's Resolutions 2: there is no metadata!
I just came across an amazingly brilliant post by Glenn McDonald at ITA software (it's been written a while ago, last summer, but just read it entirely now). Do me a favor and read it entirely here: Never Mind the...
Where is the Semantic Web Killer App? (Part 1)
June 17, 2008 By Dan Grigorovici
How do we do it? Here are some thoughts; I invite all my readers to contribute, dismiss (with arguments), oppose, enhance, etc. Only this way we can get our "pitch" to be more effective. Check back tomorrow for part two of this column.
1. Find out the business problem the Semantic Web is solving
The Semantic Web seems to many critics a "heavy" proposition: They are told they need to enrich their data with semantic meta-data/markup, rewrite their existing sites, to open up and break the data silos, etc. These are difficult requirements from a business environment that is really not that open, as most of the competitiveness still lies in ownership of data, standards, etc. (open APIs, Web Services, etc., have only begun to be en vogue, and the richest data is still closed).
This is precisely why the Semantic Web has been successful in the enterprise environment much more than "out there" on the consumer Web. Because businesses still believe that maintaining control of their data is their best asset (as opposed to opening their data, but maintaining control to processing, enriching, etc.). To use an example, we should ask ourselves (when working on our pitch for businesses and/or partners): Why would Walmart open their data to eBay, or any other competitors? Surely, we have built Linked Data from a lot of open source data sets (SIOC, Dbpedia, MusicBrainz, etc.), but the real challenge and success will happen when we have successfully convinced the Walmarts that opening their data is actually beneficial to their business.
Trying to answer this problem has implications on data and user privacy, competitiveness, and it may require us to think less semantically and more like the people we are trying to convince. But isn't this the best way to win over your "audience?" We also need to be able to answer how is the Semantic Web improving/solving/addressing the monetization problem on the Internet today, e.g. will a semantic web-based application be monetized through page views, using CPM, CPC, CPA models still, or will it disrupt existing business and revenue models (assuming there is a problem with it -- I think there is, galore). If we tie the answer to the latter question, to the answer to the first, we got ourselves a winner. These are things we can't quite answer today outside of closed enterprise semantic implementations or limited academic/research projects.
While working on answers to the questions above, we also need to come up with why are we better than what exists today. Rather than dismissing our "competitors" (which tend to be the entire Web 1.0 and 2.0), we should really study them and be ready with answers to questions that don't require reading extensively AI literature or convincing site owners to add markup to their pages simply because we are telling them it will be better. We need to start with the business problem, and end with the semantic web solution, not the other way around as we have been doing "proudly, since 2001."
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