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 2. Find out the consumer problem the Semantic Web is solving
Let's face it: the consumer/user does NOT care about the Semantic Web. They only care about things being made easier for them, while being provided an immediate value to them, ideally without displacing their current behavior too much. As naïve as it sounds (to a developer), "what can Semantic Web do for me" is a valid question that needs a good answer.
This is where conversations about the "Semantic Web" (capitalized for purism and rich with meta-data) and "semantic web" (lower case, more practical, based on statistical and machine learning) are relevant, because as long as either one of the two improves information demands of the user/consumer, it really does not matter from her perspective which avenue is taken. I argue here that, by the same token we have forgotten about the business problem, we also forgot about the consumer. This is the same consumer who can make or break the adoption of our killer app, and needs not be evangelized with teachings of RDF. My current perception of the childish sort of conversation with me as a user from many a Semantic Web application goes a little like this:
SemWeb app: Dan, you really should use our application, because you are in full control, can get your very granular information search in seconds, and can query the web like a database.
Dan: OK, that sounds nice. What do I need to do to use this?
SemWeb app: Well, you need to learn SPARQL, a bit of RDF so you can type proper query syntax for our engine; you might want to also install this (mostly) Firefox widget so that you can visualize your query results nicely. But wait, there's more: Each site you are querying might use its own schema that may not always map from one another completely so there is the chance you may get some junk as results, etc. etc.
Dan (from both the perspective of a user and SemWeb enthusiast): Well, I think I am fine spending time and lots of pages the way I have been.
My point behind the little drama above is that even though I am well connected to almost all consumer applications being developed recently and having been testing most of them, I did not find one that I used beyond its first trials. There must be a reason why that is: perhaps because we didn't get our consumer story quite straight yet.
Check back tomorrow for part 2.
Dan Grigorovici is an authority on the semantic web and advertising. He is vice president of data strategies and analytics at Tacoda, a division of AOL that runs behavioral targeting advertising networks. Prior to Tacoda, Dan worked at Digitas as the vice president/associate director of digital analytics. His startup, Disruptive Logic, is building Life Engine, a consumer cross-channel intelligent agent technology that will personalize the Internet.
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