New Year, New Web (Part 2)

By SemanticWeb.com on December 31, 2007 12:57 PM

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

In Part 1 of this two-part series, some experts provided us with their ideas on issues such as semantic web standards and how advertising will infuse the semantic web space. We continue the discussion here with more experts on how these and other trends are moving the semantic web forward in 2008.

Robert Coyne, COO, and Dean Allemang, chief scientist, at TopQuadrant, a semantic web consulting company and vendor of TopBraid suite of semantic web development and ontology management tools:

This is the year the enterprise starts deploying semantic web applications on a meaningful scale and in meaningful numbers. Why? You could say that in 2007 some things happened that changed our expectations about the web, with Web 2.0 stuff, mashups, RSS feeds are pretty mainstream now with Yahoo, Netscape and Microsoft having RSS aggregators, and with micro-formats, which aren’t in the mainstream quite yet but that’s only a matter of time. And people on social network sites are talking about migrating their information from one site to another. So people are looking at the web as a more integrated sort of thing, and as they go into the workspace they will have different expectations about information integration in the enterprise, as well. Now it’s old hat to do mash-ups on the web and people will want that kind of capability in the enterprise, too. Once people get used to something in the play-space, they want the same thing to be helpful in the work-space.

Another reason we feel it’s safe to say the enterprise will deploy semantic web applications on this scale comes from data that we can take from our own work. Part of what we do is technology training in semantic web standards and we also do solutions consulting. So people come to us to help them do deployments. Our training numbers – where people come to us and say we need training for our projects – increased 2.5 fold in 2007 from the year before. If you plot that across the year it is going up as the year goes on.

There is a huge demand in the enterprise for training, and then on the services side, the companies where we have done training are now coming to us for help with deployment, and we’re seeing services demand increase. If you take that curve and extrapolate it up in the next year, in 2008 you see on one hand a large demand for training and right on its heels, a large demand for solutions support. That makes it pretty clear that 2008 will be the big year for semantic web enterprise deployments and enterprise applications.

The third reason why we think this will occur: We’re seeing lots of evidence in our own work and more broadly that the technology has matured. The W3C core standards for the semantic web are in place now for two or more years, and awareness of them and exploration of them in many large enterprises has taken place at this point. Now people are getting more serious about how you use them and what new business-enabled applications and capabilities these technologies can support.

The W3C has launched a major initiative to collect case studies and use cases because the awareness of the technologies are there, and now in order to get change agents in the enterprise to be empowered to bring this technology to bear and get funding, they need to get case studies and use cases of what others are doing. The W3C page on this is growing quite rapidly now versus in former years with examples people are submitting. In our own work, we believe that the first integrated semantic web application development and deployment platform has enabled enterprises to have a more mature commercial platform to focus their solutions on. That’s a real force and people can move faster within their organizations to get the value proposition demonstrated, because they can progress faster in terms of their own solutions.

And in 2008, in general terms, we’ll see the enterprise focus on two primary areas: one is information integration, and that we see that across the board in several different industries and verticals. People want to be able to take multiple information sources and bring them together using semantic technology to provide a new layer that hides the physical details of their actual data schema and storage issues, so new kinds of applications can be built so that you can query and use data across multiple sources, even in real-time.

The other one we call data longevity – people want to future-proof the way they can manage the data about things, including products. Companies have a difficult time keeping track of features of their own products (like cell phone vendors where features, functions and new products evolve at a rapid pace). And trying to use fixed data schemas and relational databases is not working for them. Data longevity also includes customers like NASA, who want to be able to access information created now 10 or 15 years from now. So many forces and evolutionary changes will occur that you must think of the architecture that will support that.

Speaking of the demand to migrate information from one social network site to another, as our experts on the previous page alluded to, this to say from:

John Breslin, leader of the social software group at DERI, NUI Galway, Ireland in the areas of the Semantic Web and social software, and founder of the SIOC (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities) project:

What I hope to see more of this year is the leveraging of semantics for

representing the “social graph” and for social network portability – big

buzzwords these days. The Semantic Web is an ideal tool for allowing

people to port their social network information from one site to

another, because you can use it to represent all your friends and

profiles, and all your media contributions to a particular site (e.g.,

blog posts or the bookmarks you make). Using SIOC in combination with

other ontologies, you could have a complete semantic representation of

all the contacts and content you’ve created in the social media sites

you’re registered on, and then bring them from one site to another.

And as the data we create about ourselves proliferates across the semantically enabled Web, here’s how things may turn on the security front:

Bradley Allen, founder and CTO of search and navigation vendor Siderean Software:

Increasingly, security is something that’s going to have to devolve down to the individual as much as it does to a central authority. A major theme is the notion of being able to take back your own data, about where you’ve been and what you are interested in and all that profile information and flip that. Right now I have to go to all these different systems and they all have different descriptions of me and my interests, and all my behavior on those sites is logged and tracked. We have to turn that inside out, so that I have full access to that information, can share it with others, present it to new organizations — that again is going to be motivated by this notion of a web of data, that people fully participate in it as generators and managers of their information as well as consumers and end users of it.

Just like blogging has had a tremendous impact on journalism — both in terms of enabling traditional journalists to more effectively get their content out to people but also allowing people you can think of as amateurs to provide their own point of view — those sorts of transitions are what the next five years are about, and all that is enabled by this notion of the web of data, which is a euphemism for the semantic web and Web 2.0 principles.

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