“Semantic, shemantics” says Alan Wilensky in reaction to today’s ReadWriteweb post: Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008. I have to agree with him that these apps just all seem to process existing data in different ways to create a new node in the network rather than to deliver content that is relevant to me and that I can trust (key word: trust). But these apps are exciting because they show glimpse of what’s possible when we push beyond the search engines, particularly Zemanta (which helps you produce content better) and Glue (which helps you connect better).
When Web 2.0 became the buzzword du jour, it had to define what Web 1.0 was, and inevitably people started to question what would Web 3.0 be, if anything. However, a few publications, including a New York Times article from November 2006, shaped to the vision of what Web 3.0 is expected to become. PC Magazine defined it as:
“to many, Web 3.0 is something called the Semantic Web, a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the (first) World Wide Web. In essence, the Semantic Web is a place where machines can read web pages much as we humans read them, a place where search engines and software agents can better troll the Net and find what we’re looking for.”
Initially people thought that having a Semantic Web requires a major overhaul of data tagging and a standard organizational structure that translates across browsers and platforms. This goes against the organizational (or rather disorganization) principles of Web 2.0, where tools allow individual users to tag their content to create taxonomies that may be unrelated to one another, thus making Semantic Web an almost inconceivable plan. Yet, in MIT Technology Review (2007), John Borland wrote how the growth of UGC and social sites like flickr and del.icio.us have changed the approach to building a smarter Web, directing the research to finding ways to extract data from unstructured environments. They realize the power of self-regulating communities and it has become the Eden for the latest initiatives around Web 3.0. And that’s where companies such as the ones highlighted by ReadWriteWeb come in.
Ultimately, we need a smarter solution to Web 2.0’s explosion of content. Current search engines and organizational principles are not sufficient to make sense of the data. Critics of Web 2.0, and in particular social media, argue that social media has created an uncontrollable amount of content that is highly unreliable and impossible to distinguish. And those concerns are precisely what’s driving the arrival of Web 3.0.
Meanwhile I’m trying out a few of these applications and seeing what they do for me and how helpful they really are. I’ll post results mid December.
Have you tried any of those apps?
cross-post from digitalecologist.com
4 Comments
Thanks for the links! I’ve read about a couple of these apps before (Dapper, Zemanta), but that’s it. I could get fairly geeky talking about semantic markup ideas and how they’ve been central to my professional work for a long time, but let’s just say I have a copy of “Weaving the Web” autographed by Tim Berners-Lee and leave it at that.
I don’t have a lot of background with the semantic web, but I am always interested in learning more details about it.
Brook… do you see the semantic web, as it exists now, actually making it anywhere near the mainstream, or do you think it will change considerably before it makes its debut to the regular folks?
Here’s a comment Zemanta’s CTO posted in my blog. I thought it was a nice insight into how semantic web is evolving.
[Brook, this may be your cup of tea as his view is that we need more discussion on the HOW and not so much on the WHAT.]
“Hi,
I think lately there was too much emphasis on the Semantic web technology and vision instead of clear execution. Semantic web is a technology and a paradigm whose only purpose should be to deliver better services to end users and companies.
This means that computers need to be able to take a step in the direction of understanding the data. Processing existing content is an important thing. On the other hand large organized databases are being created from Web 2.0 resources – dbPedia, Freebase, MusicBrainz. A project called Linking Open Data (LOD) is trying to unite and federate these databases which are becoming vocabularies for software to communicate and process information between different systems.
Thus by joining completely statistical systems and systems that (to at least certain degree) tackle meanings, we will be able to create new services and (more importantly) improve old ones.
My belief is that a lot of Web 3.0 offerings are going to be “ambiental”, just popping up when there is something to help with and staying hidden most of the time. Computer becoming more of a personal assistant and less of a tool. I’d imagine telling computer to do some complex task, then being presented with results which I just check and correct – like you would deal with personal assistant.
Glue, Zemanta and a few others are following this new ambiental assistant path. I hope we’re doing a good job. We’re definitely carving for feedback. 🙂
Andraz Tori, CTO at Zemanta”
Brian,
It took me a while to write a reply this short. 🙂
Several times when I did presentations at REI, I thought about starting it with a slide that said “In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML at the European Organization for Nuclear Research because he wanted the world to be able to buy camping gear with a computer.” I always cut that slide out, but my point was that HTML was created by someone thinking about linking research papers together, but that it’s found all kinds of mainstream applications that it was never really intended for.
I think the Semantic Web is going to be kind of similar. There’s a lot of brilliant geekiness going on at the W3C, and a few clever, motivated people are applying it to real life issues. The value of semantic XML has made it essential to a lot of behind the scenes work, as well as in RSS/Atom syndication. Most people who are using these things don’t really think about the Semantic Web, just as most people using HTML in the early years didn’t really think about the intent behind it. A lot of people these days make XML that is flawed in conception — it gets the job done the same way table-based layouts did in 1996, but over time as understanding increases, the work itself will get better.