Ivan is here today for the W3C Tag and gives a keynote to the general conference audience (Slides). If you read this through Planet RDF you won’t find much new in this talk, but I think it is very appropriate for the audience of XML and Web folks here.
Is the Semantic Web AI on the Web? No. “Beware the Hype!” The Semantic Web doesn’t intend to be the Future of Human Knowledge. It is infrastructure for building software that acts as “intelligent secretaries”, but only in the sense of reducing drudge work. Database integration might be the most important application of the Semantic Web.
What is the Semantic Web, then? It is the Web of Data.
What is the relationship to AI? Some SW technologies have benefited from AI research, and the SW has brought new concerns and use cases to AI.
What is RDF? It’s about creating relationships among resources on the Web and to interchange them. It’s pretty much like the hyperlinks on the traditional Web, except there is no “current” document, there is no user-interface action for “clicking” a link, and links are typed.
But isn’t RDF simply an (ugly) XML application? No. RDF is really a graph. RDF/XML is just one way to write it down. Think in terms of graphs, the rest is syntactic sugar. Yes, RDF/XML is ugly because it was developed in the “prehistory” of XML, and now there’s too much legacy code to change it. If you prefer, use Turtle.
What about ontologies and rules? They are a “glue” to help with data integration. Ontology and rule processors can automatically find out that different concepts in graphs are actually the same thing.
Is all this surprising? No, we do this kind of data integration all the time on the Web, using our brains. This is just about adding some bits to the Web that are needed to allow machines to do a part of it.
“One has to learn formal logic to understand and use the Semantic Web.” No, it doesn’t have to be very complex. A little glue can take you quite far. There is an “onion” with RDF in the middle, then RDF Schema, OWL Lite, OWL DL, OWL Full. An application may choose the complexity it wants. Compare to SQL, where the formal semantics is very complex, but 95% of SQL users never looked at it. Developing an ontology may require more knowledge, but that’s for a small percentage of users.
Isn’t this research only? Does this have any industrial relevance? There’s a lot of activity in health care, life sciences, digital libraries, defense. There are lots of tools now, so lack of good tools is no longer an excuse. Remember the original Web started at CERN …
Ivan pointed to lots of areas of current development throughout the talk: GRDDL, RDFa, Database-to-RDF mapping (he mentions our work), SPARQL.
Richard,
I think this little series of Q&A is an excellent intro to Semantic Web, I’ve said as much on my blog.
Cheers
Alex
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