In my first Blog, I basically said that the Semantic Web is too complicated for the Web user.

A recent blog from Sandro Hawke (W3C) calling for a “Simplified RDF”, and a presentation (pdf) at the W3C Technical Plenary by Jeni Tennison talks of a “stack of complex technologies”. These have prompted me to write a followup.

RDF and OWL are two “competing” - and in the case of OWL - very complex languages. If I was a “working ontologist”, I would probably be very happy...but I am not, and so are 99.999% of the rest of the web users.

I can still remember a meeting we had with the W3C team - on a cold Winter December 1997 in Boston - to convince them of the need for a “Metadata” activity to tackle the issue of representing metadata on the web. At the time, the Dublin Core group was pushing this as there was no definitive road forward for web metadata. Even today, 13 years later, the DC group still seems to have lots of issues with encoding metadata in RDF/OWL (and even plain old XML). (The W3C Metadata Activity then grew into the Semantic Web Activity.)

What is needed is simple, and has been done before, by TimBL himself. He took the complex SGML and made a simpler HTML from it. Just by taking the most common core and simplicity wins out. SGML was for the hard-core publisher - which is not what your typical web user is. They needed something a lot simpler and lighter to use every day.

So following this, take only the “best bits” from both RDF and OWL, and the most “useful” bits - and create a new subset that is easy to use, implement, and more importantly, to understand.

I call this the Semantic Web Markup Language (SWML) - pronounced Swim-elle.

SWML will also make Linked Data more obvious and clearer and the one thing that will save the Semantic Web (ie Linked Data) should flourish and deliver on some of the promises...

How to do this? W3C needs to change and the Semantic Web leadership needs to make the (tough?) call and create a new group to design SWML. It’s been done before. The time is ripe for it to happen again.