This is the half-yearly report card on the Semantic Web. How are we doing in 2010? The breakthrough to the mainstream was predicted by Gartner to be in 2008. Oops, that did not happen. Gartner was not alone in predicting breakthrough only to be disappointed by the powers of inertia. So then we entered the “trough of disillusionment” when semantic web was banned by anybody trying to raise money or get a project approved.

But it feels different this time. Yes, we are evangelists here, not just reporters. We want this to be successful. And we know that wanting does not make it happen. But the signs of breakthrough now seem too real to dismiss.

In this post we look at 7 signs that the semantic web is crossing the chasm to the moanstream.

Image Courtesy Flickr and Paul Watson and (of course Geoffrey Moore)

This is the half-yearly report card on the Semantic Web. How are we doing in 2010? The breakthrough to the mainstream was predicted by Gartner to be in 2008. Oops, that did not happen. Gartner was not alone in predicting breakthrough only to be disappointed by the powers of inertia. So then we entered the “trough of disillusionment” when semantic web was banned by anybody trying to raise money or get a project approved.

But it feels different this time. Yes, we are evangelists here, not just reporters. We want this to be successful. And we know that wanting does not make it happen. But the signs of breakthrough now seem too real to dismiss.

In this post we look at 7 signs that the semantic web is crossing the chasm to the moanstream.

Image Courtesy Flickr and Paul Watson and (of course Geoffrey Moore)

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Back in May we published the Semantic Web 100, our list of the people tweeting interesting stuff about the Semantic Web.

That’s a lot of people to follow and a fair amount of noise obscuring the signal – lots of tweets about the World Cup or where to eat/meet/drink as well as useful but repetitive retweets.

We look through a lot of tweets so you don’t have to. But we keep that job almost manageable by restricting our tweet-cruising to people in the SemanticWeb100.

By interesting we mean a) relevant to the Semantic Web b) something original, not simply a copy of some other content.

We did this via old-fashioned “curation” (ahem, its called “editing” to ye olde publishers). We read the tweets to identify the ones that look interesting to us. Call it Filter # 1. You can do your own Filter # 2 (what we used to call “reading”) after the break.

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The old rules of innovations were:

1. basic R&D funded in academia

2. first non-grant revenue from defense

3. first commercialization from either finance or healthcare

4 a looong time later, trickle down innovation to consumer.

That flow changed during the social media era.

The old rules of innovations were:

1. basic R&D funded in academia

2. first non-grant revenue from defense

3. first commercialization from either finance or healthcare

4 a looong time later, trickle down innovation to consumer.

That flow changed during the social media era.

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Photo Courtesy Flickr/ Gábor Hojtsy

Now 10,000 sites strong, Acquia’s hosted version of Drupal – Drupal Gardens, which debuted in January – is positioned not only to eliminate barriers to adoption of the open source content management system to a crowd that would rather be hands-off on the hosting, configuration, security and upgrade front. It also is positioned potentially to help push the Semantic Web ahead, bringing technologies such as RDF to the attention of a new swath of users if it successfully surfs the wave behind Drupal.

Think about that passionate community behind Drupal. Some half million sites already have been built in the Drupal do-it-yourself mode, and about 6,000 modules contributed to it. (Whenever this blog has done a story that mentions Drupal, by the way, the response to it is usually significant.) Acquia, the company co-founded by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert to provide software, tools and support for Drupal social publishing sites, has expanded to about 65 employees over the last two years – a growth spurt that was in part responsible for Buytaert’s recent relocation to Boston from his native Belgium. Making Drupal more accessible via a hosted version can stoke those fires – especially as Buytaert moves ahead with plans he disclosed to The Semantic Web blog about building a commercial ecosystem around Drupal Gardens.

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In our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series, we have looked at the following markets: Financial Services, B2B Media, STM Publishing, Education, Legal Publishing, Advertising, eCommerce.

We now turn our attention to Market Research. In this Part 1, we look at the current cash cows and market incumbents.

Market Research grew up with advertising during the radio age of the 1920s. It grew much bigger during the TV age of the 1950s, but remained essentially the same. It is now being fundamentally reinvented during the Internet age.

Image courtesy of Flickr and Miller Info Commons.

In our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series, we have looked at the following markets: Financial Services, B2B Media, STM Publishing, Education, Legal Publishing, Advertising, eCommerce.

We now turn our attention to Market Research. In this Part 1, we look at the current cash cows and market incumbents.

Market Research grew up with advertising during the radio age of the 1920s. It grew much bigger during the TV age of the 1950s, but remained essentially the same. It is now being fundamentally reinvented during the Internet age.

Image courtesy of Flickr and Miller Info Commons.

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What do you send people who you want to introduce to the semantic web to persuade them to take it seriously? Lets say you want to persuade a senior business leader to approve a project/budget that includes semantic web technology?

We want to collect the best introductions here. We assume it will be “horses for courses”, you will select the one best suite to your needs. In some cases your audience might be quite tech savvy, in other cases not. Some people like absorbing information in words, others want images and others want to hear it.

Best practice is always to customize a presentation to the specific needs of the person. But we hope that this will at least serve as a starting point. We will update this post with new introductions as we find them.

image courtesy Flickr and Larah McElroy

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Legal Publishing is one of the markets that we covered in our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series. Here are Part 1 and Part 2.

Earlier this week, we did an update on Law.gov. Today we take a look at something that is already established in the market – Creative Commons. It is simple and getting a lot of momentum and it points the way to a legal semantic web one clause at a time.

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The semantic web is building upon over a decade of academic R&D. Now is the time when we start to see the impact. We want to showcase the sites that really move the semantic web forward with cool stuff that impact our lives.

Read on for the categories, judges and how to apply…

Photo courtesy Flickr and MoBikeFred

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Legal Publishing is one of the markets that we covered in our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series. Here are Part 1 and Part 2.

We identified Legal Publishing as very early in Act 2, meaning that while we see innovation the incumbents are still very much in control. The most fundamental innovation that we identified, the big long wave, was Law.Gov. So we decided to dig a bit deeper to get an update.

Here is the basic mission of Law.Gov:

“Law.Gov is an effort to create a report documenting exactly what it would take to create a distributed registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States.

By primary legal materials, we mean all materials that have the force of law and are part of the law-making process including: briefs and opinions from the judiciary; reports, hearings, and laws from the legislative branch; and regulations, audits, grants, and other materials from the executive branch. Creating the system from open source software building blocks will allow states and municipalities to make their materials available as well.”

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We have been following a 3 part formula for each market we investigate in our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play.

Part 1: the current incumbents, the current cash cows

Part 2: the current innovators, the startups that may make a difference

Part 3: the science fiction future, what the market will look like if some of the innovation we are seeing gets real traction.

The Part 3 for two markets are now due – Advertising and eCommerce. We decided to do one post rather than two, as we see these markets converging in the semantic future.

Picture via Flickr, courtesy Erik Mona.

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