Tague: Simplify Your Semantic Tools

By SemanticWeb.com on June 16, 2009 4:17 PM

Tom Dunlap
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

SAN JOSE, Calif. — If you build semantic web tools, they will come. A lot of them will, anyway.

That was the (highly paraphrased) message today from Tom Tague, Calais Initiative lead for Thomson Reuters, at his SemTech 2009 Conference keynote here today.

Regarding the emerging semantic web, Tague said we’re at the inflection point where innovation has exploded. And now tools — easy to understand tools — are needed.

For certain companies, the semantic web is going to happen, Tague told the capacity crowd at the Fairmont Hotel. But they’re not going to Twitter about it. It won’t happen because it’s “cool.”

“It’s going to happen because it’s cheaper and faster,” Tague said.

He used the Gold Rush analogy. The miners didn’t make the money, he said. The hardware sellers, Levi Strauss, the train companies, and other tool makers made the real money.

“But I want to caution the tool vendors: in 80 percent of the discussions, I left the discussion, one, feeling stupid; two, not understanding what they do; and three, with my check in my pocket.” Thus the tool vendors need to simplify their stories, Tague said.

“Go build a tool,” he said later in his entertaining speech. “Don’t start a user-experience company. People will buy your tool.”

Another hot area that the semantic crowd should pay attention to is gaming, Tague said. But he means learning the lessons from gaming, not “semantic gaming.”

“Take your hands off your keyboards. Please don’t write ‘semantic gaming’ and Tweet it,” he joked.

Some of the lessons from games is that they have a great story line, high interactivity, and immediate responsiveness. When playing a game, “how many times do you have to click a hyperlink to the get to the next level?” he asked. Games are fun and graphically engaging. “People buy fun.”

Semantic search, Tague said, is another matter, calling it a bifurcated marketplace. He called semantic search the field’s “brilliant yet underachieving child. It may yet be the answer to the question no one is asking.”

Later, he put it more starkly: “[Semantic search] is a red herring. People aren’t having trouble finding the hotel. We need to move beyond that.”

He says, for now, the real area where this works is domain-specific semantically enhanced search, like medicine.

Tague is one of the best semantic web evangelists on the scene. His speech helped cut through the muck, and his slides were easy to understand, although he apologized for over-simplifying some of his presentation, explaining by saying: “My name is Tom Tague, and I’m a recovering consultant.”

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