U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown this week stepped up support of the semantic web by the British government, with the establishment of and £30 million funding for the Institute of Web Science headed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt. He also announced more plans to further the U.K.’s open data movement to make public data public. Among his announced plans are for the Department for Transport and the transport industry to make available the core reference datasets that contain the precise names and co-ordinates of all bus stops, railway stations and airports in Britain; to release information held by ordnance survey to the public, without restrictions on re-use; and to publish online an inventory of all non-personal datasets held by government departments.

Seems that Brown is aiming to turn what was once Tony Blair’s fashion-and music-infused Cool Britannia into Semantic Web Rules Britannia. That’s potentially an exciting prospect. Dr. Patrick Carmichael, Professor of Educational Research at Liverpool John Moores University, sees the plans as a very important development for anyone interested in the role of semantic web and linked data technologies in teaching and learning. Such is the primary concern of the ESRC-EPSRC funded research project he directs (Ensemble: Semantic Technologies for the Enhancement of Case Based Learning). “The release, free from constraints, of substantial collections of geospatial data, for example, has enormous potential in educational applications – at every level from school to advanced professional learning,” he says. Carmichael adds that he also is interested to see how the plans will promote the development of data provision for the semantic web by other organizations, public bodies, museums, galleries and the NGO sector.

“The real value of the semantic web will emerge when it incorporates and represents many sources and voices – not just large information providers who want to increase their reach and impact,” he says. “We’ve seen the power of user-generated content in Web 2.0 applications – I hope we see the same diversity and decentralization in the development of the semantic web, and that this important initiative contributes to this.”

But semantic web and IT leaders from the U.K. also raise some cautions. Regarding the new Institute, “I think it’s a superb idea in principle, but will the spend be on developing what has already been developed or is in R&D elsewhere …. acting as a catalyst …?” asks Alastair Behenna, the U.K.-based CIO at global professional recruitment consultancy and IT outsourcing services provider Harvey Nash plc. “If it’s an aggregator of excellence and an incubator of semantic web development, then fantastic. But if it’s just reinventing the wheel, then this is just political PR and we don’t need more of that … and 30 mill will go nowhere fast.”

Dan Hanley, CTO at U.K.-based Magus, a website governance and compliance firm whose services are built on a semantic platform, questions whether the new Institute will address either or both of what he says are two pressing issues. Berners-Lee’s cry for raw data now, Hanley says, has produced some laudable results, but there is still much to be done. “There are at least two classes of problem, which need to be addressed, neither of which are trivial: the mundane; how to make this data easily and repeatably available, and the esoteric; computable logics for reasoning with this data at web scale.”

The data made available by gov.uk, he says, is piecemeal, tends not to be machine-readable, comes in many diverse formats and is typically not even close to real time. “It is all very well for Alice in the COI [that's the U.K.'s Central Office of Information] to copy some data into a PDF and publish it. It is a far more complex thing to change Alice’s working practices so that the publication of the data in a machine readable (e.g. RDF) format is an automatic byproduct of her work,” he says. And the naysayers who point out the “inconvenient truth” that current description logics don’t work at web scale ” are often accused of trying to boil the oceans by the Southampton clique, but the reality is unless we see some fundamental breakthroughs in the basic science we will always be limited to brewing cups of semantic tea.”

Growth Driver?
In his announcement, Brown pinned post-recession growth in part on Britain’s being the world leader in the digital economy which he said will create over a quarter of a million skilled jobs by 2020. “Underpinning the digital transformation that we are likely to see over the coming decade is the creation of the next generation of the web – what is called the semantic web, or the web of linked data….. It will change fundamentally the way we conduct business – with new enterprises by-passing traditional media communications and governmental organizations: new enterprises spun off from the new data, information and knowledge that flows more freely.” To build on this next generation web and the opening up of information and data, he said, requires as one step making Britain the leading superfast broadband digital power, with full digital access to every home. Steps two and three, he said, are opening up data and using digital technology to transform the way citizens interact with government, and creating £11 billion of savings by driving up operational efficiency through the increased transparency and reduced costs made available by new technology.

“Lots of interesting stuff here,” comments Behenna.” But I don’t particularly see it driving growth per se. I’d rather see concrete plans to roll out superfast broadband to all and not just talk about it. Where are they going to get the funding, staff and tech from to do all this when they are cutting public spending? How will the priorities fall in the morass of other stuff that needs doing..?” Absent visible deliverables ,timescales and absolute funding plans, he has some skepticism. “Get the 4 million plus who aren’t online or who never have been or can’t afford to be online and using YouGov services, and let’s see those plans and completion timescales in substantial form,” he says. “Talk is cheap and as Peter Drucker said ‘Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes… but no plans.’”

And as beneficial as these developments could be for educational purposes, Carmichael is at the same time concerned at the implication that knowledge of value emerges through engagement with ever-larger sets of data. “Our research suggests that there is no direct correlation between access to ‘authentic’ data and what one might call ‘authentic’ learning – the nuanced, critical and reflective engagement that characterizes the expert learner or practitioner – not just in academia, but in other fields too,” he says. He notes that a recent report from the British Library highlighted how the informational literacies of PhD students across disciplines have actually been compromised by the ready availability of online resources; students have new digital skills, but they are overly dependent on generic search tools rather than engaging more deeply with specialist databases, collections and archives, and developing the associated research practices that are actually very important, he says.

“New technologies bring with them demands for new digital literacies, and we need to be careful that we encourage the ‘users’ of these data – teachers learners, researchers and users of public services – to engage with them critically.” he says. “The provenance, granularity and potential biased-ness of data (and the means by which they have been associated, linked and reasoned with) should not be obscured by slick interfaces or spurious claims to ‘personalisation.’”

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