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GCN Home > 02/18/08 issue

Mike Daconta | How the Social Web saved the Semantic Web

Another View—commentary

By Mike Daconta

The Semantic Web, a framework for allowing data to be shared and reused across traditional boundaries, has struggled to cross the chasm between early adopters and the mainstream.

Most people agree with the ideas behind strong semantics, but the cost of implementing those ideas has been too high, and it has taken too long. Thus the technology has grown slowly — mostly among customers with deep pockets, such as those in the financial industry and the intelligence community.

The availability of good commercial tools typically lowers costs and speeds time to market, which fuels adoption.

However, the largest cost for the Semantic Web is human expertise, a cost that has remained greater than the tool investment. Thus the chief culprit holding back the Semantic Web has not been the tools but the lack of reusable and semantically rich data.

Data is the honey of the Web, and if exposed to people and systems, it attracts applications to exploit it. The more applications that share data, the greater the need for the semantics to be formalized, and a cycle is born. Enter the social Web, with communities around shared data such as photos (Flickr), Web links (del.icio.us), friends (MySpace, Facebook), encyclopedia information (Wikipedia) and news (Digg).

The social Web uses interaction and collaboration to make computing a social medium. At its center is a community of people who are willing to create and/or refine data by adding content, tags, ratings, discussions and connections — creating honey pots of semantically rich data.

Consumers are also catching on to the idea of owning and moving their data around — for example, by moving their social networks from MySpace to Facebook or vice versa.

Knowledge portability is a key goal of the knowledge representation community and technologies such as the Web Ontology Language.

Additionally, young people are very comfortable with this technology, even preferring it to older forms of social interaction.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Web Strategies, Workflow / Collaboration



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