• Post Reply Bookmark Topic Watch Topic
  • New Topic
programming forums Java Mobile Certification Databases Caching Books Engineering Micro Controllers OS Languages Paradigms IDEs Build Tools Frameworks Application Servers Open Source This Site Careers Other Pie Elite all forums
this forum made possible by our volunteer staff, including ...
Marshals:
  • Campbell Ritchie
  • Jeanne Boyarsky
  • Ron McLeod
  • Paul Clapham
  • Liutauras Vilda
Sheriffs:
  • paul wheaton
  • Rob Spoor
  • Devaka Cooray
Saloon Keepers:
  • Stephan van Hulst
  • Tim Holloway
  • Carey Brown
  • Frits Walraven
  • Tim Moores
Bartenders:
  • Mikalai Zaikin

Why are things moving so slowly with the Semantic Web?

 
Author and all-around good cowpoke
Posts: 13078
6
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
When I first read about the Semantic Web effort, I thought that the idea would appeal to many people and that work would get done quickly. Instead it seems that the idea is slow to catch on, and that people are content to blunder around in the vast resource that the web constitutes with "google" and "yahoo" level access.
Anybody have an idea as to why things are moving so slowly?

In case anybody is interested, here are a couple of references I have found:
A Java project on sourceforge.
The "Ontology Alignment" project.
XML Topic Maps - ISBN 0-201-74960-2
Bill
 
author
Posts: 30
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
On the surface, it does seem that progress has been slow. There are several reasons -

1) To develop all the more optimistic capabilities that were hyped is very hard.

2) It is hard to come up with convincing business models that show good financial returns, so it is hard to get a lot of investment. Of course, it was the same for the web until the last few years.

3) Much of the early work has been in establishing standards for knowledge representation and ontology construction.

4) A lot of people got the idea that the name of the game would be to add marked up meta data to web sites, but adding meta data tends to be expensive and uninteresting. However, adding marked up meta data is just one way in which data on the web can be made more accessible to computers, and not necessarily the main way. This is coming to be understood more widely.

Much of this preliminary work has been done now, and there is definitely an upswing of interest in, for example, RDF and OWL. There are a great number of Semantic Web-related conferences and workshops around the world, and there is getting to be quite a lot of RDF data available.

So the rate of development seems to be picking up.
 
mister krabs
Posts: 13974
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
Where are we with standards? Are standards being developed that make sense and will allow inter-communication throughout the web? It seems to me that a key problem is that so little of the information on the web is in a machine friendly format. What do you see as the key standards that developers should be keeping their eyes on over the next couple of years?
 
Tom Passin
author
Posts: 30
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
Well, the standards for the fundamentals are getting to be in fairly good shape -

- RDF and Topic Maps for knowledge representation.
- OWL for ontologies.
- FIPA as a base for developing agents (though this is an abstract framework and needs to be implemented to be useful).
- Digital signatures for various uses involving XML documents.

We need to keep an eye on toolkits and libraries that use these base technologies, along with related standards such as RDF and Topic Map query languages. We also need more work on exchange and query protocols - how should I ask "send me what you know about X"?.

RDF also needs some more capability for identifying and talking about so-called subgraphs, which are fragments of an RDF data set.

One really important problem is how to know when two "resources" - subjects of discussion in RDF, say - actually represent the same thing. So we need to keep an eye on developments in this area.

The ability to point into a document and specify a part of it needs to be advanced. True, there is XPointer, but it is widely disliked and is not much implemented, and also it only applies to XML documents at this point.

We need more work on how to embed meta data into existing document types, like HTML.

And we need much more work on how to make all this distributed stuff secure.

In the web services area there is OWL-S, which used to be DAML-S, for describing and possible composing web services using RDF and OWL.

Another area to watch is the progress in automated theorem provers and rules engines that can work fast enough with RDF, etc., to do practical work.

I'd say that these are the main areas to be keeping an eye on for the time being.
 
William Brogden
Author and all-around good cowpoke
Posts: 13078
6
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator

And we need much more work on how to make all this distributed stuff secure.


I had not thought about that, but you are right - when the Semantic Web becomes important to commerce, the hackers will come out of the woodwork. Look at all the Google cheats, and how much money is involved.
Bill
 
Thomas Paul
mister krabs
Posts: 13974
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
OK, all I have to do is say "Wow"! There's a lot there. Is your book going to help me get started with understanding all of this? Does the book point to other resources (especially web resources) once I have a handle on the material that you cover?
 
Thomas Paul
mister krabs
Posts: 13974
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator

Originally posted by William Brogden:
I had not thought about that, but you are right - when the Semantic Web becomes important to commerce, the hackers will come out of the woodwork.

Let's just hope Microsoft isn't designing these standards!!!
 
William Brogden
Author and all-around good cowpoke
Posts: 13078
6
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator

Let's just hope Microsoft isn't designing these standards!!!

Had me LOL!
But, yaknow, that brings up a serious question. With MS putting a big effort into the search engine game, will they follow their previous path of creating non-standard/secret/patented/obfuscated methods or cooperate with the rest of the community and standization.
Does MS have technical people on the committees involved with the standardization attempts?
Bill
 
Tom Passin
author
Posts: 30
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator

Thomas Paul asked
Is your book going to help me get started with understanding all of this? Does the book point to other resources (especially web resources) once I have a handle on the material that you cover?



Yes, it will. That's why I wrote it - so that people like you and me can get a grip on the goals and technologies of the Semantic Web and how they all fit together. Mind you, the material is more at the level of concepts than of programming detail, but that's what you need to start getting your arms around the subject. As for pointers to resources, there are a lot of references in the book - about five pages of references, in fact, and many of them are on line. They are not mainly tutorial references, but once you start reading some basic Semantic Web-related resources, you start picking up lots of pointer to others.
 
Ranch Hand
Posts: 5093
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
People so like to kick againt Microsoft but don't forget that Microsoft is where the money is...
And as stated with investment in the entire net low right now you want Microsoft there as they're one of the few places that still have money left to throw at long term goals.

They're heavily involved in the W3C, including the HTML, CSS and XML comitees.

If IE uses non-standard stuff that's mostly because Microsoft chooses to sometimes incorporate draft standards in their products now rather than wait for the W3 to finalise them.
Being draft standards things are open for change before being finalised.
 
reply
    Bookmark Topic Watch Topic
  • New Topic