RDF Semantic Web Research Isn't Working
Published 1 year ago by Zack Rosen
It has been twelve years since Tim Berners-Lee threw up his hands and said "it's all crap, let's do it over" and set off to create the Semantic Web. We've got very little to show for it so far. I firmly believe the work Semantic Web technologists are pursuing is important and the concepts will inevitably be realized and I very much want to see this research become viable. But things are not moving fast enough and the tack semantic researchers are taking simply isn't working.
Semantic Web technology is marred in a chicken/egg paradox. The technologies are generally not useful unless they are adopted and implemented on a large scale and people are not willing to invest in implementing them unless they are useful. This is exacerbated by the fact that there are very high technology, business, and social barriers to implementing the Semantic Web.
- Technology Barriers: Even today, implementing RDF parsers is complex and difficult and the best tools are hopelessly slow. These are the most basic and fundamental tools the Semantic Web needs to operate and we still can't get them to work.
- Business Barriers: If the Semantic Web is implemented the current web industry will be intensely disrupted. EBay, Google, Amazon - virtually all mainstays of web-business will have to significantly adjust their business and technology models. Because of this web-businesses are trepidacious when it comes to investing, adopting, and promoting the Semantic Web.
- Social Barriers: The way in which we use the web will be greatly changed when the Semantic Web is implemented. Just look at the current state of usability in feed aggregation for a hint of what will be required for users to adopt the newly realized functionality.
These barriers are far from insurmountable, but the tack the current researchers are taking simply won't cut it.
- Researchers are not finding adequate use-cases for implementing compelling functionality, instead they are creating widgets. There are a great many of organizations out there with real-world needs that would be greatly served by implemented Semantic Web-technology but researchers are for the most part turning a blind eye and working in a vacuum.
- Researchers are not picking their battles. Instead they are building generic tools with little real world applicability.
- Researchers are not keeping up with the web and web-publishing software. It seems that in an effort to remain neutral towards the current web-publishing industry Semantic Web researches choose to build their own tools in isolation. This means that anyone wanting to reuse these tools in a real world application has to re-implement them within their own web-publishing environment which due to the high technology barriers simply isn't happening. This is a shame because it would actually save the researchers time, effort, and money if they simply implemented their tools within web-publishing environments such as Drupal and it would allow adopters to implement the tools at zero cost.
- Researchers are not moving at the pace the web is currently developing, instead they are attempting to leap-frog it. A good example of this is the Microformats initiative. Why are Semantic Web researchers not collaborating with the teams pursuing these projects?
So what can we do about it?
- Researchers need to stop thinking of themselves as researchers and start thinking of themselves as implementers.
- Research institutes need to join forces with emerging businesses looking to adopt semantic technology. This breaks the current model of business / research institute collaboration since startups do not have money to contribute to fund research, but tough noogies.
- Researchers need to build their tools in real-world development environments, i.e. as modules for LAMP web-publishing tools such as Drupal and Wordpress. They need to find more organizational partners to deploy their solutions. They need to do something other than build widgets.
This article is a re-post of an article that was originally published in 2006. Some of the points are now outdated.
About the author
I am a founding partner at Chapter Three LLC, an open-source web development company. I started Mission Bicycle, a custom bicycle company. Previously, I started a non-profit technology project named CivicSpace with my friend Neil Drumm and directed it for two years. I live in the Mission district of San Francisco.
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Posted by Kjetil Kjernsmo on July 31, 2010 at 12:02am
The Semantic Web has problems, but your analysis is very shallow. As an example, Drupal 6 is a huge number of RDF modules, and Drupal 7 is built entirely around RDF concepts.
Posted by Martynas on July 31, 2010 at 7:39am
Sorry, but you forgot to do your own research -- the criticism is pulled out of thin air.
Have you not heard about projects like DBPedia, FreeBase, Linking Open Data, data.gov.uk, GoodRelations? I suggest you check them out first.
Posted by Nathan on July 31, 2010 at 7:47am
very well written article! shame 95%+ of it is completely made up bollocks :(
Posted by Richard Cyganiak on July 31, 2010 at 8:17am
Didn't I read this article somewhere else before? Like, in 2006?
http://www.zacker.org/semantic-web-research-isnt-working
I'm surprised that Semantic Focus tolerates such laziness from its authors.
Posted by Alex on July 31, 2010 at 8:38am
http://www.zacker.org/semantic-web-research-isnt-working
2006. This article is simply outdated...
Posted by Alex on July 31, 2010 at 8:39am
Oups, sorry, already done
Posted by James Simmons on July 31, 2010 at 1:16pm
@Richard:
It isn't laziness on Zack's part. I emailed him and asked him if I could re-post this on Semantic Focus. He was nice enough to allow me to do so.
I wanted to re-post this because it's a good piece to reflect on in 2010. I know it's outdated in many of the points it makes -- and that's a good thing. Maybe I should add a disclaimer to the article to curb any further frustration from my readers.
Posted by Snark on July 31, 2010 at 1:38pm
It has been four years since Zack threw up his hands and said "it's all crap, let’s do it over" so here we are doing it again!
Posted by David Sherr on July 31, 2010 at 1:43pm
RDF is just another additive technology. Look how long it took linux to realize the dream of unix. By my calculations we got another 10 years or so.
Posted by Stéphane Corlosquet on July 31, 2010 at 1:49pm
@James: yes, re-posting a 4-year old article without giving any context is unfair, many of the points in this article are completely outdated by the adoption we're seeing today and the pool of RDF tools and implementations available. To give a couple of examples:
- "virtually all mainstays of web-business will have to significantly adjust their business and technology models": they've already started, look at Google's Rich Snippets, Yahoo! SearchMonkey, Facebook Open Graph protocol built on RDFa, Google buying Freebase.
- "Researchers need to build their tools in real-world development environments": LAMP has several RDF libs (ARC2, EasyRDF), RDFa is part of Drupal 7, Wordpress has a couple of plugins, Elgg is working on it, StatusNet exports FOAF. And I'm not talking about Java here...
Posted by James Simmons on July 31, 2010 at 2:03pm
@Stéphane: Agreed, on all points. I apologize to all Semantic Focus readers for posting this without giving any context.
Posted by Richard Cyganiak on July 31, 2010 at 3:31pm
James, thanks for clarifying. Yes, a note on the article to provide context right from the start would have helped, without this it's just asking to be taken in the wrong light.
Apologies to Zack for my wrong assumption that posting it in this form was his idea.
Posted by nchauvat on August 1, 2010 at 7:17am
CubicWeb is a python-based semantic web framework that would be a good foundation for implementing research ideas. License is LGPL and website is http://www.cubicweb.org
Posted by ereteo on August 6, 2010 at 2:54am
@james so do you think you will add any context?
"@Stéphane: Agreed, on all points. I apologize to all Semantic Focus readers for posting this without giving any context."
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Posted by Paul Houle on September 16, 2010 at 12:59pm
One of the troubles with Semantic Web research is that it's possible to succeed at doing research (that is, get grants, present papers at conferences, get more grants) without being successful at "changing the world".
For instance, a lot of people think that Doug Lenat's "Cyc" project has failed -- it certainly has failed in the sense that it hasn't changed the world, but it's been very successful in the sense that Lenat has been able to hire 50 or so programmers to work on several iterations of it, getting revenue both from government grants and from some big corporate buyers. Most of us who are in the software business for the money would love to have success like that!
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