Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The new year undoubtedly will bring new developments on the semantic web front. To find out what these might be, SemanticWeb.com asked some thinkers and innovators in the semantic web space for their opinions on what may lie ahead for 2008 – and beyond.

In the first part of this two-part series, SemanticWeb.com presents the thoughts of some experts in the semantic space. So, without further adieu:

Nova Spivack, CEO & Founder, Radar Networks:

Semantics will increasingly make their way into the social graph, creating the semantic graph, or what Tim Berners-Lee calls the GGG (Giant Global Graph).

Location-based services will continue to make important progress. Two examples are ZoneTag and Zurfer, which semantic web expert Tom Gruber describes as “mobile-phone photo-driven applications that use your social, spatial, and temporal context to support and enhance key user tasks on the mobile device and intelligently help you capture, upload, tag, view and search for photos on your mobile device, minimizing requirements on explicit input and user attention” and PARC-demonstrated technology codenamed Magitti, which Gruber describes in the same blog as “a mobile leisure guide that recommends places to visit in an urban environment. It pays attention to your time, location, past behavior and preferences and it also infers your current and future activity type to better target its recommendations.” Think too about the recent Google announcement that does pseudo-GPS via Google maps.

Open data is really going to catch on: 2008 will bring big advances in data (mostly in RDF triples) that is self-describing and free of the silos to which it is currently confined – we’ll also see more control and ownership of data by end-users.

We will see much wider adoption of sem web standards like RDF, OWL and SPARQL.

We will begin to see the true emergence of the Web as the ultimate platform – not Facebook, not Freebase, none of these proprietary platforms that have said explicitly in public that they want to be a platform, even THE platform. The Web will win and we’ll start to see this transition start to take place meaningfully in 2008, which is tied to the development of the semweb and the coinciding paradigm shift from the Web as a file-server metaphor, to the Web as a database metaphor.

The semweb will start to make its way to the consumer on a more massive scale – this is obviously Twine’s goal too, but there are several companies working on the consumer-oriented semantic web and we’ll see very important strides here as these companies and products start to scale to that level of adoption – and in 2008 it will also become clear what the first killer app is for the semweb.

We will also see in 2008 the first major acquisition by the likes of Google, Yahoo, or maybe even Oracle of a smaller semweb player.

And finally, we’ll start to see how the Semantic Web will impact advertising – this won’t become a reality until after 2010ish, but we will see prototypes and first efforts in 2008 that will get people really excited about the possibilities here (and they may be a little scared, too!)

Speaking of advertising and marketing, this to say from:

Alistair Goodman, VP of strategic marketing at Exponential Interactive Inc., a technology-enabled media services company focused on the online space:

What happens in 2008? Do I think there will be explosive adoption next year [for marketers to use semantic analysis to create a more relevant experience for online users]? No, but do I think some marketer or set of marketers will test the waters with it. [Some semantic services] providers will offer marketers the opportunity to do that – surely they are thinking about commericalization possibilities for this and a logical one is marketing in terms of generating revenue.

And always there are early adopters in the media world who will look at that and say, ‘What can we do with that?’ But this won’t be widespread until we have a tool that works, whatever that tool looks like, and it gets some wins under its belt.

And speaking of standards – and their adoption, or lack of it – that’s a topic our next expert delves into, too:

Alex Iskold, CEO of smart browser and personalization vendor AdaptiveBlue:

I am not anticipating anything really big, as the process of introducing Semantics to the web is rather gradual. Many interesting startups in the space and big companies are making good progress using different methods. AdaptiveBlue and a few others are focused on the top-down, lighter approach, and we believe that it is going to prove to be more fruitful and more useful for the end users.

In general I am skeptical about success of the bottom-up approach, which requires annotation of information by content owners. I am also skeptical about the ability to create and maintain common ontologies. On top of that, even if we had all of these in place, computers would still not be able to solve really complex problems. So my take is that we need more pragmatic engineering around semantics which leverages existing information.

Lack of adoption of standards has been and will remain to be a challenge. If content owners annotated the information the web would be much richer with semantics. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to happen. So the challenge of pragmatic technologies will be to interpret existing information with great degree of accuracy.

It seems that search is not going to be the killer application of semantics, more likely it is going to be discovery. The thing about semantics is that it facilitates better understanding of the content. In turn this leads to ability to correlate the content better, and that is discovery. The discovery is more likely to benefit consumers.

Others have some thoughts on the standards front, as well:

Nigel Shadbolt, professor of artificial intelligence in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University in the U.K., as well as CTO of semantic web startup Garlik:

The power in all of this is linked data, planetary-wide linked data at a level of resolution of a grain size, below the document, which provides an opportunity to link material in different ways. It provides the opportunity to get into databases, the hidden web. And with the launch of SPARQL [an RDF query language and data access protocol] that we shall see recommended [by the W3C] in January, that will give people opportunities to access this content in the kind of seamless way we expect web page look-ups to work. I think as you get more of the public sector and user-generated content online and available, I think people will start to mash this stuff up in very interesting ways.

And:

Elisa F. Kendall, CEO of context modeling and transformation software vendor Sandpiper Software, Inc. and co-chair of the Object Management Group’s ontology group:

I believe that OMG will start publishing standard “vocabularies” next year, including ontologies, SBVR or RDF vocabularies, possibly also domain metamodels (which is already being done), but in a way that will allow us to map them to one another. I’m not sure how far we will get on the searchable repository front, but it’s possible. This is a new area for OMG, but fills a gap that I think is needed in order to facilitate developers.

Another area where I think some real progress will be made is in using semantic technologies to augment complex event processing systems. We’re doing work in this area, but lots of other people are as well. This may emerge through CEP vendors such as TIBCO, ILOG, etc. who will start to say more about semantics next year. The vendors to watch are those participating in the W3C Rule Interchange Format (RIF) working group.

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