What do you send people who you want to introduce to the semantic web to persuade them to take it seriously? Lets say you want to persuade a senior business leader to approve a project/budget that includes semantic web technology?

We want to collect the best introductions here. We assume it will be “horses for courses”, you will select the one best suite to your needs. In some cases your audience might be quite tech savvy, in other cases not. Some people like absorbing information in words, others want images and others want to hear it.

Best practice is always to customize a presentation to the specific needs of the person. But we hope that this will at least serve as a starting point. We will update this post with new introductions as we find them.

image courtesy Flickr and Larah McElroy

Authoritative Sources?

Some people want to know that the source of the information is authoritative. So we start with the introductions to the semantic web that Google views as authoritative ie that are on page 1 when you Google semantic web.

• Many people view Wikipedia as authoritative. So the Wikipedia entry for Semantic Web is a good starting point. It is also the first link when you search Google, so your audience may go here anyway.

Our take: it is a good starting point for somebody who really wants to research the semantic web, as it has a ton of links. But in the use case we described, it might fail. The reaction might be “OMG, this looks far too complex. Next!”

• Next on the Google search list is a non-profit SemanticWeb.org “portal for publishing information on research and development related to the topics Semantic Web and Wikis.”

Our take: the actual entry on Semantic Web is very weak. It is a wiki and clearly anybody motivated to update this is updating the Wikipedia entry. They would probably be better served to simply link to the DBPedia or Wikipedia entries.

• The # 3 Google search entry is the official W3.org site for Semantic Web.

Our take: This site has excellent links. It is also the perfect place if you are interested in the details of the standards. But it is off-putting for your general biz/tech person looking for an intro.

• Sticking with authoritative sources on Google Page one, we have the original article in Scientific American in 2001 by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila.

Our take: it is well written and lays out the vision in a compelling way. As a historical artifact it is unique. There is one problem: after a short intro, the rest of the article is behind a paywall! So this won’t work as an intro.

Kate Ray’s Unique Appetizer

If you want to get somebody interested enough to do some more research, this 14 minute film by Kate Ray is the perfect thing to give you the appetite to tuck into the main course:

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

It does not give enough education for you to have an informed dialogue about your project. But after watching this, your audience may allocate the time to study some of the other introductions.

10 Other Introductions

We chose 10 as we had to have some limit and there are so many intros to look at.

First we look at other sites on Google page one as a) this may be some indication of quality (at least most of the commercial Internet is based on that premise) and b) these are what the average person looking to understand semantic web might see.

1. Infomesh article from 2001. This site is no longer maintained. But you can see why people link to it. The article explains technology clearly and simply. The lack of images makes it appear too dense for some people. And it is now a bit out of date.

2. W3Schools.com. These people are educators and it shows. Concepts are explained well. But there is no index, just “next chapter”. And it lacks good images.

3. David Siegel’s book, Pull. Good news for David and this excellent book that it is on Google Page 1. I recommend this book highly for somebody taking a strategic business look at this. I have bought a copy for a friend for exactly this purpose. It is not a tutorial in the technicalities, but it is great as a tour of the horizon. But the entry point is $18.45 on Amazon and a few days for delivery. Once somebody has got interested, send them this to get their gray cells buzzing.

4. LogicError.com has the daunting-sounding “semantic web in depth” by Aaron Swartz “with much assistance”. Despite the title, it is no longer than some of the other text-centric intros and covers similar ground.

5. YouTube Intro # 1.
This aims to explain to “anybody who can open a web browser”.
<a href="“>YouTube intro # 1.
There is a reason we call video “rich media”. Adding moving images and sound makes concepts easier to understand. It is 6 minutes, less than half as long as the Kate Ray film but is more technical.

There is only one other YouTube video on Google Page 1 for semantic web but – be warned – it is 49 minutes long and starts explaining something about SIOC. This is hardly an intro.

All the rest are not interesting to Google (they are not on Page 1). But we think they are good:

6. YouTube intro # 2, Tim Berners-Lee. This is 8.24 minutes of a talking head but he is just the best person for making the complex understandable.

7. Alex Iskold on Read Write Web. Alex is an entrepreneur, developer and ex-teacher and is excellent at explaining technology. This post is my favorite of his many posts related to semantic web as it outlines the two fundamentally different ways of approaching it – top down or bottom up.

8. Explaining Semantic Web using a stamp example. This is less well known but has great clarity. There is a Part 1 but that dumbs it down a bit too much and combining them is too long. But this gets a lot of complexity across in a way that is not daunting:

9. Disclosure: I wrote this one. It is a very short intro for somebody who does not even have time for Kate Ray’s appetizer, just a quick Expresso and on with work. It was OK to write this when I did not know much about Semantic Web. As soon as anybody gives a better alternative in comments I will replace it!

10. Yes, we are allowed two from Sir Tim. This is his one from TED in 2009, his call for “raw data now”.

What Have We Missed And Which Ones Do You Like?

We want this to be a living document and will update it when we hear of good ones. Tell us which introductions work for you.

• Don’t forget to propose your startup for our Semantic Web Impact Awards. The deadline is Sept. 15.

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