Semantic Web set for critical mass

InfoWorld - The Semantic Web, the long-ballyhooed concept to make it easier to find pertinent information and link varying types of data on the Web, is finally closing in on critical mass, W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) officials contended Tuesday at a technical conference.

The idea of a Semantic Web has been bantered about for what seems like a decade now, but it has never gained much dominance on the IT stage. But all that may be changing.

[ Last year, the Semantic Web took a big step forward with the publication of the SPARQL query technology. ]

"We're very close to [critical mass]," said Ralph Swick, technology and society technical director for the W3C, in an interview at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, Calif. The conference features vendors pitching wares to commercialize semantic concepts.

"We've been working on it for 10 years, and we're starting to see the commercial pickup," Swick said. Critical Semantic Web technologies are under the jurisdiction of the WC3, including RDF (Resource Description Framework) for representing information on the Web; OWL (Web Ontology Language), enabling information in documents to be processed by applications; and SPARQL for querying RDF data.

The Semantic Web can be used for applications, such as building better mashups or publishing Facebook data, said Ivan Herman, Semantic Web activity lead at W3C. He cited "mashups on steroids" as one use. Using Semantic Web technologies, information could be accessed and linked, such as data in medical databases, geographical information, and government data, rather than just documents, Herman said.

A presenter at the conference, Thomas Tague, a platform strategy official at Thomson Reuters, advised technology developers to devise tools that use the Semantic Web and semantics. Thomson Reuters uses semantic concepts in its OpenCalais service for data-filtering.

"Go build a tool. Don't start a user experience company," Tague said. Examples of such tools could be a database to deal with semantic metadata or tools for modeling that data.

"Semantic technologies have been available for a long time," Tague said. "Frankly, it's time to talk about where the money is. It's just time to have that conversation."

Monetization could come from perhaps adding semantic capabilities to social sites and improving opportunities for advertising performance. Semantic search is another possibility for the Semantic Web. Domain-specific search also presents possibilities in such areas as real estate, music, or pharmaceuticals, Tague said. Semantic gaming also presents an opportunity, with games being extraordinarily interactive, he said.

"Not everybody needs to be the next Google," Tague stressed. "You can build incredibly strong, successful businesses by developing solutions that add high value to a small audience."