Are Semantic Researchers Missing the Big Picture?
Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor
As the only large, open, distributed, and dynamic network known to most researchers, the Web provides an excellent example for using semantic technology to enable interoperability on a large scale. But a leading researcher in the field thinks that by focusing primarily on the application of semantics in that arena, the scientific community may be missing the bigger picture.
Dieter Fensel is the president and founder of The Semantic Technology Institute International (STi2), an umbrella organization for research, education, and commercial players around semantic technology. A leading international think tank, the organization started about a year ago with the goal of establishing semantics as a core pillar of modern computer engineering. According to its web site, it is taking the lead in developing new business models and in improving the way people and businesses communicate and interact.
Fensel’s research focuses around the usage of semantics in 21st century computer science, and his long history in the field includes having held positions at the University of Karlsruhe, the University of Amsterdam, and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, served as Scientific Director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and been an executive member of a number of semantics-related research projects, to name just a few of his past activities.
In January, Fensel published the first STI Technical Report, “Semantic Technology –More than Just an Appendix of the Web,” in which he urges the semantic web community to remember, and act on, the second of the two reasons that has driven it in the direction of the semantic web in the first place.
According to the report, the first reason to apply semantic technology to the web had two parts: 1) because the web needs semantics, because adding tags to text may influence the rendering, retrieval and maintenance of information, and 2) because the web is a perfect dissemination media for semantic technology — that is, it is useful for semantics, as he writes. But the first reason, where semantics is a means applied to the web, though the more visible one, is more superficial, and may “prove to be a dead end.”
The real challenge, he writes, is “whether it has enough intrinsic innovative potential to enable a successful sustainable scientific and commercial community on a large scale.” This relates to what he says is second and the more principled reason the community began to apply semantics to the web a decade ago: the brittleness of knowledge-based systems and the knowledge acquisition bottleneck that combined to put knowledge technology in a state of crisis. Knowledge was not contextual and reusable, and generating formalized knowledge in niche expert systems could not provide timely ROI. Even solutions (such as the DARPA-funded Knowledge Sharing Effort) still could not achieve meaningful interoperability among niche systems.
Concluding that semantic technology should be applied to big and significant problems, Fensel writes that the biggest and most challenging problem today “is how to interweave all today’s distributed, heterogeneous, and changing implementations into networks of added value. Increased interoperability for large, open, heterogeneous and distributed environments coping with dynamicity is the actual challenge of our time.” And, he writes, “semantics seems to be the only means that can provide scalability for interoperability … That is, scalable interoperability not only requires semantics, but it cannot even be imagined without the usage of semantics.”
The paper comments that there is a certain risk to the current “stampede” to the semantic web, as it is finding success in terms of public funding, public awareness and more commercial activities. That is, the risk that the semantic web community will focus on the first reason for applying semantic technology to the web rather than the second reason, and so stick to the superficial view of a semantic web rather than a semantic web implying that all innovation and developments stem from the web.
Dr. Fensel commented on that risk in an email response to Semanticweb.com: “My point is that I see promising and interesting application of semantics beyond the web,” he writes. “For example, we do a lot on research of apply[ing] in semantics to all aspects of Enterprise Application Integration where you integrate data, processes, and services (and not only web pages). Commercially we have our first start-up in this area www.seekda.com.” (Seekda facilitates on-demand usage of services over the Web. Initially it is operating a search engine providing access to publicly available Web services.)
Is the industry neglecting the greater overall goals of scalability for interoperability?
“No,” writes Fensel. “I think they are aware of [it]. For example, Michael Broodie, Scientific Director at Verizon, estimates that world wide around 1 trillion dollars are spent per annumn on application integration. The semantic web community (and not the industry) is mostly ignoring this area.” Fensel sees the paper as a step to reminding the scientific community working on semantics about the ends of bringing interoperability to large, open, distributed, dynamic networks. “I try hard to open their eyes. As soon as scientist[s] have found a toy they are very hard to motivate to look for other ones,” he notes.
The paper also mentions that funding for research into iterative versions of the semantic web (2.0, 3.0, etc.) is not the durable strategy it may appear. Speaking primarily of European research funding, this “will naturally decrease with any further iteration,” he writes. In his email, he notes that the European commission has now funded semantic web technologies and wants to see more broader approaches in the future. “Actually they call this the internet of the future (capturing also the internet of the things that even stronger interweaves virtual and physical worlds),” he writes.
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