[Editor's Note: This guest editorial is provided by Sean Golliher. He can be found on Twitter at @seangolliher]

Google announced they’re rolling out new enhancements to their search technology and they’re calling it the “Knowledge Graph.”  For those involved in the Semantic Web Google’s “Knowledge Graph” is nothing new. After watching the video, and reading through the announcements, the Google engineers are giving the impression, to those familiar with this field, that they have created something new and innovative.

While it ‘s commendable that Google is improving search it’s interesting to note the direct translations of Google’s “new language” to the existing semantic web vocabulary. Normally engineers and researchers quote, or at least reference, the original sources of their ideas. One can’t help but notice that the semantic web isn’t mentioned in any of Google’s announcements. After watching the different reactions from the semantic web community I found that many took notice of the language Google used and how the ideas from the semantic web were repackaged as “new” and discovered by Google.

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Rob Gonzalez of Cambridge Semantics recently commented on a LinkedIn thread started by Michael Uschold. Uschold asked the question, “How is semantic technology more flexible than relational technology?” One commenter stated, “If you ‘mess up’ your choice of initial vocabulary, then semantic systems have similar sorts of problems to relational systems, in that you may have to restructure the vocabulary at a later date (just like you have to restructure relational schemas), and hence restructure the data. My experience suggests that such restructuring happens (far?) less often with semantic systems than with relational systems, and that the restructuring is easier, since you can always treat your data as one big list of triples.” Read more

Rob Gonzalez has written a new online lesson discussing the two views of how to apply the semantic web. He explains, “Various authors and practitioners have radically different view on how best to apply Semantic Web technologies. Some see its potential best applied to artificial intelligence, while others feel that it would be better applied within the context of its flexible data model. This lesson aims to clarify these two distinct points of view and to consider a few of the advantages of each perspective.” Read more

Roy Tennant recently wrote an opinion piece declaring that microdata, not RDF, will power the semantic web. Needless to say, this stirred up some strong opinions in the comments. Tennant writes, “While RDF is complex, and designed to be implemented as a stand-alone depiction of metadata, it does have an implementation that is designed for embedding in web pages: RDFa. On the other hand, microdata is relatively simple and solely designed to be embedded in web pages. While the metadata cognoscenti are in the RDF camp, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! have thrown their lot in with microdata by launching the Schema.org effort. Were I a betting man, I wouldn’t be backing RDF at this point.”

As we reported in November, schema.org has indicated support for both microdata and RDFa. Read more

Mark Ballard has commented on the UK’s Department of Business, Innovation and Skills’ recent action to dissolve the Public Data Corporation “while its confused policy Cabinet joint Office initiative team works out how to make open data workable. The Cabinet Office rushed out a revamped Open Data strategy on 29 November, ‘delivering on its commitment to establish a Public Data Corporation’. BIS had already established the Public Data Corporation as a private company on 11 November 2010. But the company had laid dormant for a year while the departments and the Local Public Data Panel worked out how to get an HM data-set free-for-all round the vast bellies of such comfortable institutions as the Ordnance Survey, Land Registry and Met Office.” Read more

Disclaimer:  This article does not reflect the views of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and does not constitute endorsement by the EPA of the standards or products mentioned.

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