Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

This year saw the largest number of entries ever for the Semantic Web Challenge, an event held at the Sixth International Semantic Web Conference in Busan, Korea. There were nineteen entries, up from fourteen last year — as well as an increase in the accessibility of the applications, and the number of them that converge the worlds of the semantic web and Web 2.0. That all says a few things to Peter Mika, a former winner himself of the Semantic Web Challenge and co-chair of the 2006 and 2007 competitions.

“What I take away is that it’s becoming easier to develop semantic web applications, and that’s because of the tools that we have,” says Mika, also a researcher at Yahoo! Research in Barcelona. “That’s a very good thing, because it used to be a huge problem, that a lot of these technologies really required PhDs to understand. Now things are maturing, there are a lot more easy-to-use tools, documentation, and examples to build on.”

This year’s entries, as in past years, reflect the competition’s mission of taking semantic technology to the open web, where it can be accessible to everyone at web-scale, instead of semantics as applied to enterprise applications and closed-loop environments.

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To that end, the applications must meet the minimum criteria to be considered for the Semantic Web Challenge: 1) being designed for end users (rather than being a tool or a component); 2) of using the meaning of data in some sense; and 3) of making use of heterogeneous distributed data — that is, using at least two different data sources that are not under direct control of the person developing the application. But because of the preponderance of data in closed-domain applications, entries to date have included those focused on closed-domain applications, where competitors build on a limited number of resources that use rich ontologies, and which can use much more reasoning power.

Next year, the competition’s organizers will be pushing even harder on the open web side of things, because they have gained sponsorship to add a second competition.

“The idea is we get a billion triple data sets from the web, real world data from linked data, microformats, whatever we can find. Really messy, dirty data, and give it to people and tell them to do something with it,” says Mika. “If you’re into cleansing of data, try to clean it; if you’re into ontology mapping, try to find possible mappings. So it’s pushing the scale, pushing the openness, pushing a few points that we see are missing.”

Regarding this year’s winners, Mika says they represent a number of trends. For instance, the improvement in user interfaces evidenced by Potluck, which provides a purely graphical way of mapping between schemas, or the explicit grouping of resources displayed by GroupMe.

“Here you have tags and resources, but you can also create bundles of resources, and that’s a new exploitable kind of semantics for searching and ranking,” he says. Or Revyu.com, which as a review site displays Web 2.0 constructs but in a more semantic way. “It opens it up basically to any resource you can name, and it brings in additional data about that resource if it can find anything, and it also exports this information to the web,” Mika notes.

Ultimately, the semantic web will affect millions of people, Mika notes, and the work that gets featured at the Semantic Web Challenge will do its share to help make the ambitious vision come true. But not too soon.

“We’re still very far from the ambitious reach, which had to be ambitious, because in order to bootstrap the semantic web and really bring in people, you had to promise something big,” says Mika. “And I think that something big is still out there.”

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