Ron Miller
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

With the announcement of Google Wave at the recent Google I/O conference in San Francisco, there has been a lot of speculation about what this technology means. Some have suggested that it’s semantic technology at work, but is it? Experts we asked don’t believe it is in its initial form, but it has the potential to be depending on how people end up using the programmatic hooks into Google Wave.

Just What is Google Wave?

Google Wave is a unified communications platform. Think of it as a container where you can have email, instant messaging, photos, video and live document sharing in a single place, but the beauty of it is that Waves (collections of interactions, documents and rich media) are not confined to the platform, so you could embed Wave technology in a blog or web site and have the same functionality as inside the program interface. What’s more, you could see those interactions as part of the Google Wave interface, or you might never have to open the program, depending on how you implement it. The Google blog defines a Wave this way:

“A ‘wave’ is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.”

What’s more, Google Wave is open source and is more a platform than application, so it leaves plenty of room for extensibility. Google Wave definitely takes Web 2.0 concepts and raises them to a new level, but is it Web 3.0?

What Makes a Semantic Technology?

Mills Davis, managing director at Project10X says Semantic technology begins when we represent the knowledge about something separately from the artifacts in a form that allows computers and humans to reason with it.

“Both Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 approaches represent knowledge that is fixed — such as an API, or relatively fixed such as a general ledger account structure,” Davis says. “Where Web 3.0 differs from Web 2.0 is when it comes to knowledge that is dynamic, changing, evolving — and where the system learns.”

He adds that it also involves getting smarter about natural language, making sense of changing information on the web, or building a semantic fabric to link together lots of different data sources, where the number of data sources continues to grow.

Does Google Wave Meet These Criteria?

Davis doesn’t believe it does, at least not yet. “Google Wave, at this point, provides a cloud-based, fixed ontology, open-source communication object framework for doing lots and lots of really neat things, and even more by using its open external API, but I’ve heard no mention of semantic web standards being used in Wave.”

He says the knowledge that powers waves is fixed, not dynamic, and while there is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, it means that the knowledge in Wave only gets updated when there is a new release.

Marc Strohlein, who covers semantic technologies for the analyst firm Outsell, Inc. agrees with Davis. “I don’t see anything that would make me label it as such although it does contain some semantic technology, most notably the NLP-based spelling engine,” Strohlein says.

Might be Semantic Some Day

But just because it isn’t semantic technology today, both analysts believe there is potential for it be a semantic technology as semantic developers take advantage of the APIs to connect to the application. Strohlein says, “The content-centric nature of Wave makes it a natural for semantic applications that can search and parse content, then take action based on the meaning or context of that content. Google is clearly hoping and expecting that developers will do the heavy lifting in extending Wave and it seems likely that semantic technology developers will jump on it.”

Davis concurs when he says, “As I watched the video [introducing Google Wave at the I/O Conference], I couldn’t help but think about how one might be able extend and semantically enable the Wave platform. For example, it would be easy to expose Wave APIs and internal structures semantically. Similarly, it looks pretty easy to interface semantic web-enabled capabilities with Wave. Also, one could add semiotic and natural language processing.”

Bottom line is that out of the box, Google Wave is clearly not Semantic Technology, at least not as an expert like Davis defines it, but because of the way Google has designed the platform as open source with lots of hooks for programmers, it has great potential to take advantage of Semantic Technology. That may be just semantics, but these experts believe there is a difference.

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