How Semantic Technologies can rule the Web
As you may know, I believe that the future of computing is through the use of Semantic Technologies in order to link knowledge (note the contrast with the words “data” or even “content”) in a way that is more natural for humans but also understandable for machines. Although many enthousiasts (including the W3C) try to push semantic standards to the public to follow the vision of Tim Berners-Lee (well know for having written the foundings of the Semantic Web in Weaving the Web), many detractors think that this vision is naive/idealistic and that it will thus never work. I believe that we are ready to Semanticize the Web, but it will take time and we should not expect the masses to do the hard work.
Concerning the Semantic Web, Mor dared to declare publicly that the “The Semantic Web is Dead“. On his article The Emerging-Semantics Web (”The Semantic Web is Dead”), he claims that, even with Web2.0 in which users annotate data and the use of microformats, we cannot expect the masses to generate Semantic data (or should I say knowledge). As I commented on his article, it’s true that nobody but geeks can write pure Semantic data (using RDF for example, and it would not be perfect anyway). But wouldn’t it be the responsability of the platforms (i.e. websites/webservices that allow users to feed their databases with user data) to enrich the user data with semantics? I explain this idea on Mor’s article, check it out.
On his article “Moving Towards the Semantic Web: Grassroots vs. Ivory Towers“, James Simmons shares a similar belief that Semantizing the Web must be done by developers on their publishing platforms, not by the masses using these platforms. In his explaination, he smartly introduces two categories of Semantic Web believers: “Grassroots” and “Ivory Towers”. The Ivory Towers (we’re mainly thinking of the W3C) make the Semantic Web by building its foundations in a top-down approach. They define standards to store, link, query and represent semantic data on the web but their vision of how the web should be is too idealistic for now, as they are on Tim Berners-Lee’s side. Whereas the Grassroots make the Web more Semantic, following a bottom-up approach. For example, they enrich state-of-art websites using smart tricks like microformats to embed metadata within XHTML pages.
Like James, I believe that the Semantic Web is starting to grow as developers build bridges between the current Web and semantic standards. According to the fact that most content of the web is stored using platforms like WordPress (for blogs), Joomla (for websites) or even Facebook (for social networking), this evolution could become exponential soon if the developers of these popular platforms integrate some semantics in them. It’s a long way to Tim Berners-Lee’s (and other Ivory Towers’) vision for sure, but we’ll get there progressively!
My Netvibes page