The Dark Side of the Semantic Web
Since I hear rumors are flying, I thought I had better fess up - I did indeed give a talk entitled “The Dark Side of the Semantic Web” at Edinburgh last week (download the slides - pdf - from here). However, before you all start to beat me up - let me point out that the first couple of slides make it clear I am not talking about “Dark Side” as in the force, but rather as in the “dark side of the moon,” that is, the side many people don’t see.
This talk was a first stab at a talk I hope to give more times in the future, and it’s aimed at explaining to the more AI side of the Semantic Web house about what is happening down in the more Webbie side of things. To me one of the most exciting things going on in the Semantic Web is that we’re starting to see the “A little Semantics goes a long way” starting to come true — this thing that is being called “Web 3.0″ is, if you look at it and squint a bit, the side of the Semantic Web that is looking at how do you use a small amount of Sem Web (think Foaf or Skos) to add a bit of organizational knowledge (and to webize with URIs) to tagging sites, microformats, and etc. It is the realization that the REST approach to the world is a wonderful way to use RDF and it is enpowered by the emerging standards of SPARQL, GRDDL, RDF/A and the like. In short, it is the Semantic Web vision of Tim’s, before Ora and I polluted it with all this ontology stuff, coming real! And the good news for folks like me is that some little pieces of OWL turn out to be important to making this work (OWL Ultra Lite?) and thus something using a little bit of the sweat and blood of us WOWG folks is proving to actually be useful in the Web world and is transitioning faster than I think many of us realize.
I know this isn’t the “dark side” of the Semantic Web to many of the folks out there in blog space (especially you folks in the PlanetRDF world) - you’ve been trying to explain this to me for years now (Kendall, I apologize for not understanding for so long!!) - but I finally get it, and it is exciting as heck. It may not be what the EU IST program is funding, and thus it may be a while till we see this enter the ISWC world in a big way - but wow, it’s cool to see some Silicon Valley interest in at least something that grew out of that stuff we did back in the DAML days…
And to my AI buddies holed up in your Ivy covered towers, it’s true, I have sold out to the Dark Side — get over it!
-Jim Hendler, MIND Lab
December 14th, 2006 at 4:49 am
[…] It’s great to see someone like Jim Hendler get it: …you use a small amount of Sem Web (think Foaf or Skos) to add a bit of organizational knowledge (and to webize with URIs) to tagging sites, microformats, and etc. It is the realization that the REST approach to the world is a wonderful way to use RDF and it is enpowered by the emerging standards of SPARQL, GRDDL, RDF/A and the like. […]
December 14th, 2006 at 9:53 am
Nice explanation Jim, it’s good to promote the fact that Semantic Web has moved on from just data to things that can now use and transform this data…
Some nice examples are given by Kingsley Idehen in this post / image, and of course in the SIOC Project we now have some paths from data to useful applications (see most recent presentation).
December 14th, 2006 at 6:18 pm
I think SIOC (and ping the Semantic Web) are definitely steps in the right direction - I’m definitely a fan.
December 14th, 2006 at 11:58 pm
Nice article Jim, but I’d just point out - since you mention it - that SPARQL has some definite issues from a REST (and Webarch, for that matter) POV.
December 15th, 2006 at 1:34 am
Mark - if you look at the slides I linked to this you’ll see hwta i have in mind — the idea is that you can build a web app which is HTTP-GET, server uses Sparql to create the response from a triple store, and then return is XHTML - thus the front part is pure REST and a standard Web app, but the backend part is now Sparql instead of SQL - many web apps use SQL in this role now, new ones can use SPARQL in a similar way…
January 23rd, 2007 at 9:39 am
[…] Like the web, the Semantic Web will be distributed en heterogenous. It is an utopy to expect that all similar data on the Semantic Web will use the same ontologies. It has been sufficiently showen that ontology engineering for a large community is very hard and time-consuming. I am therefore convinced that, at least to bootstrap the Semantic Web, lightweight ontologies are the way to go. This process can also be witnessed in the Semantic Web Communtiy. More and more people are convinced that heavyweight ontologies where proof and logic are key, might be not the way to go, at least for now. A very interesting post by Jim Hendler describes it as “the dark side of the Semantic Web“. […]
March 13th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
[…] If you look at what I’ve been writing since 2001 (in the Semantic Web article in Scientific American, coauthored w/Tim Berners-Lee and Ora Lassila) through my recent posts on the ‘Dark side of the Semantic Web‘ - I, and many others, have not been arguing for controlled ontologies - rather, we designed the Semantic Web technologies, and especially OWL, to encourage linking and reuse. We do believe there will be some carefully controlled ontologies in high value areas (such as the Cancer ontology which the national cancer institute maintains) but that much use would be by extension and linking to these…. […]