Misrepresenting the Semantic Web
Published 3 years ago by James Simmons
Jim Rapoza at eWeek has an opinion about gaming the Semantic Web regarding companies and developers that are using the Semantic Web label inappropriately. He makes a good point worth mentioning: When an innovative new idea comes along and gets popular enough it is commonplace to see vendors and companies take some of the concepts and strategies of the idea and try to adapt them, but are often not true to the idea's core principals (either purposely or accidentally).
In a recent interview between Jim and Tim Berners-Lee, Tim said for a product to really be a Semantic Web product, it must support key standards such as RDF. Berners-Lee is the inventor of the Semantic Web and both he and the W3C are in the best position to make the rules.
So what is being falsely labeled as Semantic Web? He never mentions any specific companies, people, or products. I'm actually going to go out on a limb here and name a service from ClearForest called Semantic Web Service. It's essentially a Web service for named entity extraction. SWS is a very neat service and I am a big fan of what they're doing with it (see Gnosis). I just don't consider "Semantic Web Service" to be an appropriate name, even though I consider natural language processing to be a topic related to the development of the Semantic Web.
Who is misrepresenting the Semantic Web?
About the author
It's my goal to help bring about the Semantic Web. I also like to explore related topics like natural language processing, information retrieval, and web evolution. I'm the primary author of Semantic Focus and I'm currently working on several Semantic Web projects.
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Posted by Cody Burleson on August 3, 2007 at 7:56am
This is a very good point and I am guessing that we are going to be seeing a lot more of this soon. In fact, I would go even further personally to make the definition slightly more strict than just a requirement for use of a technology in the SW cake like RDF. Perhaps I would venture to say that there must also be an intention for improved integration and better machine interoperability? Eh... that's debatable. I see this a lot with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Any time a new technology term creates a wave in the zeitguiest, every marketeer in the industry tries to surf it before they really even understanding it. There will be a lot of people and organizations who want to capitalize on the buzz around Semantic Web (if there is one). But I think we also have to be careful to have consideration for people who may simply not understand, but are trying hard to. I know from my own experience that there are many concepts within the Semantic Web and not a one of them has a simple name or is that easy to understand. Many people will, I predict, use the terminology incorrectly by mistake at first, but not for the sake of gaming.
Posted by James on August 3, 2007 at 5:18pm
I agree that the concepts of the Semantic Web require a bit of time to get your mind around. These concepts will need to be more easily explainable in the future if we are to get more people on board with the Semantic Web. We need to be able to attract venture capitalists, executives, end-users, and developers alike.