Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Radar Networks, the stealth-mode semantic web start-up, is working on what CEO and founder Nova Spivack calls a consumer-facing service that will help people manage and share their knowledge on the web in some new ways.

Aimed at making the strength of the semantic web really useful to regular mortals, as Spivack puts it, the company will be talking more about its technology, which will include capabilities such as semantic search, this fall, and rolling it out in stages.

The semantic web is rolling out in stages, as well.

“I think that the semantic web is an evolution more than a revolution,” says Spivack, who co-founded EarthWeb in the ’90s. It is, he thinks, an upgrade of the capabilities of the existing web rather than a replacement. “At first it won’t be as radical a change as some people have hyped it. It will be an iterative, incremental, gradual improvement of all the information tools we use, and that will over time reach a tipping point. But that’s more than ten years away.”

But some people’s evolution might be others’ revolution, he acknowledges.

“Maybe making things 20% more productive is kind of revolutionary, but to me revolutionary is someone discovers how to do teleporting,” he says. “I don’t think it’s like that.”

Providing Structure to Data

That’s not to say Spivack doesn’t have enormous belief in its significance. The semantic data web is based on open standards run by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) that include RDF (the Resource Description Framework for providing metadata about Internet resources), the SPARQL query language, and the web ontology language OWL, a semantic markup language for publishing and sharing ontologies on the World Wide Web.

Beyond plain old semantics, the semantic data web lets you provide structure to data, turn unstructured data into structured data, and turn structured data into more interoperable structured data. And that is the foundation for turning the web into something more like a database understandable by any machine that understands RDF and OWL and is compliant with those standards.

“The one thing I think will happen is you will start to see structured data made accessible through APIs. It is today, but you must know the schema in advance,” he says. Not so with the semantic web. SPARQL lets you send a query in RDF format into any service that has a SPARQL API access point on it, and get an answer back in RDF. Imagine people taking a database – even if that doesn’t exist in RDF, you can put a SPARQL access point to it – and create a query that makes it easier to mix and reuse data, he says, making database mash-ups easier to accomplish.

Next Page: Who Will Miss the Boat? …

That has implications for initiatives in the supply chain integration world, for one thing.

“For supply chain integration having the ability to use ontologies and semantic web data APIs could be useful. A company will put up a product catalog and Company B wants to pull that in because they are starting to use their parts, and they can use that data right away without doing a lot of work,” he says. “You don’t have to write a database schema.”

Professionals will also benefit from better tools for collaboration. A lot of collaborative applications are database-driven, but databases are too hard to make and too hard to administer, says Spivack. That changes with the semantic web, where it becomes easy to create new data types and extend them and build new databases, without being a database developer.

For individuals, the semantic web will enable a richer experience of the web, especially around search, because it will allow for greater precision; around social networking, where it can add richness to profiles of persons and their relationships; around user-generated content, where content tags will be connected to networks of context; and around making data more portable.

Today, your data is stuck in various applications, but as all these data formats get mappings to RDF you will start to be able to “rescue data from silos and reuse it in another place. So it will improve the free market for consumers of where they want to put their data,” he says. They can move email from one application into another or bookmarks from one browser to another, for example.

Ultimately, that could affect the fortunes of some big vendors.

“Some companies and organizations are about platform lock-in, and those companies will be late adopters and may miss the boat,” says Spivack, referencing as an example one nameless vendor with the stock symbol MSFT. “That business model may not survive,. The next big model may be openness and platform freedom. You own your data and we make it really easy to take it wherever you want and if you don’t want to leave it with us that’s fine.”

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