Semantic Web -- Is Anyone Going to Tag all this Stuff?

I am in SF at the Semantic Technology Conference 2005, optimistically self-described by chairman Dave McComb as the "First Annual" Semantic Technology Conference.

The conference has been an interesting mix of appreciation and doubt.  As expected at an event organized to bring together the minds focused on promoting the Semantic Web, there are many sold on Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the next version of the Web -- all information will be tagged and machine-readable.  More surprising to me, however, is the number of clearly dubious attendees and presenters such as Peter Norvig at Google that are struggling to understand why someone would take the time to tag all of this information.   As Dr. Norvig said, Google is going to find and organize the information regardless of its semantic structure, so why bother tagging it.

I think both constituents have good points, but the Semantic Web will have its day in the sun.  The value of semantic structures is undeniable and can already be seen in services like Amazon, Froogle and ZoomInfo  (the company I work for).  Data that has been presented either on the web in multiple unstructured forms, within books, and/or collected as purchasing data, has been semantically linked and represented by these services to return new content (or the right content) to the user that is more useful for their specific purpose than any of the original information.  The difference between these services and the Semantic Web is that these services don't use pre-tagged data.  Instead, they use linguistics or other intelligence to repurpose the information in a more useful way.

Just as the Web, however, allowed an upstart like Amazon to compete with Barnes & Noble, the Semantic Web has the potential to level the playing field again for a whole new generation of startups.  With the Semantic Web in place, any vendor will have the ability to tag their product information and make it as easily accessible as Amazon.  Further, they will have the ability to track purchasing habits and present products in the right place at the right time.  Companies will have a much easier time collaborating because information of any form will be more easily stored, recovered, and acted upon.  The concept of a single robust digital identity will become a reality because privacy and permissions will have a secure and universal place to live.  The list goes on...

It is this disruptive potential of the Semantic Web that I think will allow it to come to fruition.  Will it be called the Semantic Web, or SemWeb as some are calling it?  Will it have anything to do with the standards presented by W3C?  Who knows, but everything will be tagged and machine-readable one day, and a lot of it will be done by intelligent, automated services like ZoomInfo, and platforms like the one being developed by Radar Networks.

Judging by the speed of adoption of the original web, it will happen sooner rather than later...

Comments

[gary halliwell]

Google's doubts are interesting, but I think founded in a lower value-add approach to information. There is no denying the value of more structured data which is the mainstay behind consumer sites like Amazon and the ever-growing electronic business publishing industry where I have worked for the past 12 years. It is interesting to note that search engines like Google have left the electronic business information industry untouched for the most part while the web has fostered significant growth in this industry through greater accessibility to end-users. However, there is a gap between Google's automated indexing of unstructured data and the manual data tagging at the database publishers. These philosophies represent two ends of a spectrum that if brought together, could deliver significant additional value through richer value-added content available on a much larger scale.

The Semantic Web seems to me to be the missing link. I think companies like Eliyon are demonstrating this with intelligent approaches that combine the power and breadth of internet search with automated subject tagging to create value-add beyond the search engine.

But I think this is important in a larger sense. Remember the Internet bubble and all that promise about what the Internet could deliver? The bubble burst before the value was fully realized across the vast majority of areas. But that promise is still there and is being unlocked every day. I think there are three ingredients to realizing the full potential that piqued the interest of all those investors, and all of them are about efficiency. The first is software efficiency in the form of web services, so that software and applications across different systems and organizations can communicate. Second is hardware efficiency in the form of on-demand computing so that the massive storage and processor demands that are needed to be truly always-connected become cost-effective. Third, and most relevant here, is data efficiency. Software and hardware are only the plumbing behind the business systems and commerce that the world’s economy is increasingly built on. Information is what flows through these pipes, and information is nasty, dirty stuff that can easily clog up the system. If your data doesn’t match across systems, then you can forget about much of the value promised by those systems. What do I mean by that? As an example, think of two companies with a channel partnership wanting to share customer information. Anyone who has implemented CRM, billing and order systems within a single company will know that unless the information in each system is unified, and issues such as control vocabularies or uniform tags are used, matching the data to provide reports is impossible (never mind real-time reporting). Matching this type of data across two companies who want to share information requires information compatability. I think this is where the value of semantic web lies: in providing the lubricant to make data useable and able to flow through the IT infrastructure of the increasingly connected and ever-efficient world. It's the third leg behind delivering the full potential of the internet, and well beyond the purview of Google and the search engine industry