Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

This month Jorge Cardoso of the Department of Mathematics and Engineering at the University of Madeira in Funchal, Portugal, published a paper entitled “The Semantic Web Vision: Where Are We?”

Cardoso is well-qualified to ask the question. A Ph.D. in computer science, he’s published more than 60 papers in the areas of workflow management systems, semantic web, and related fields, and he was the co-organizer and co-chair of the three International Workshops on Semantic and Dynamic Web Processes.

To answer the question, Cardoso conducted a survey of 627 participants between December and January, based on 14 questions related to particular aspects of the semantic web and its technologies. The survey covered the following categories: tools and languages for building ontologies and the ontology languages used; ontology, which asked which domain or industry was affected, what methodology was used; and why and how to align and integrate ontologies; ontology size; and production, which looked into timeframes for developing ontologies and putting systems to work.

One finding — perhaps not a surprising one considering where a lot of semantic web activity is — is that when asked to indicate for which industries they were representing knowledge with ontologies, education took the lead (31 percent), followed closely by computer software (28.5 percent,), with government (17 percent), business services (17 percent), and life sciences (16.5 percent) tracking next in line. Communications (13 percent), the media (12.8 percent) and healthcare providers (11.3 percent) were the only other industries to see double-digit percentages.

Another finding is that respondents are using ontologies mainly to share a common understanding of the structure of information among people or software agents, so models can be understood by humans and computers. In total, just about 12 percent use ontologies for code generation, data integration, data publication and exchange, document annotation, information retrieval, search, reasoning, annotating experiments, building common vocabularies, web service discovery or mediation, and enabling interoperability.

“The language with the strongest impact in the semantic web is without a doubt OWL (which is derived from DAML+OIL and builds upon the resource description framework),” writes the author, noting that more than 75 percent of ontologists have selected this language to develop their ontologies. Yet, he also notes that description logic and FLogic have a penetration rate of 17 percent and 11.8 percent, respectively, and that RDF(S) and DAML+OIL have a penetration rate higher than 64 percent and 12 percent, respectively. Cardoso concludes that “the study shows that the semantic web does not even need OWL and can
achieve important objectives such as data-sharing and data-integration using just RDF alone.”

When asked which method they used to develop ontologies, “We were overcome by the percentage of respondents (60 percent) that develop ontologies without using any methodology,” the author writes. Another surprising finding for the author is that “the ontologies being developed are much smaller in size than can be ascertained from many research papers and conference keynotes and talks.”

According to the report, each respondent was asked to indicate the average size of the smallest, typical, and biggest ontologies they were working with. Nearly 75 percent said that their smallest ontologies had less than 100 concepts, and about 20 said they had between 100 and 1,000 concepts.

“When asked about typical ontologies, 44 percent of respondents stated that such types of ontology had between 100 and 1,000 concepts, and 35 percent considered that typical ontologies in their organization have less than 100 concepts. Finally, when asked about the biggest ontologies being deployed, the majority of respondents, 33.5 percent, considered that this type of ontology had between 100 and 1,000 concepts.”

When will ontology-based systems be put into production? While Cardoso acknowledges that mainstream adoption of the semantic web is still five to ten years away, 70 percent of the people surveyed working on the semantic web are “committed to deploying real-world systems that will go into production in less than 2 years,” he concludes.

While nearly 30 percent actually have no plans to use such systems in the future, “more than twenty five (25.4 percent) of the respondents indicated that their organization was currently active in the development and installation of ontology-based systems. Almost 21 percent stated that they will put their ontology-based systems into production within 6 months, while 13.7 percent will wait one more year. About 12 percent will deploy ontology-based systems within 18 or 24 months.

SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !