RDF and OWL - The New SGML ?
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.
The Semantic Web is like a Box of Chocolates
The Semantic Web has had its challenges over the years in trying to become mainstream. One of the most promising subareas (that has the best chance) is Linked Data. Not that LD is dependent on the SW - all you really need is consistent and persistent URIs and a way to say “sameAs” in a number of ways....SKOS could help here.
Anyway, TBL’s recent talk entitled “Linked data: it's is not like that; it's like a bag of potato chips” (see the video and blog) was not the answer. LD is not like a Bag of Chips. The information on the back has been standardised by government and social requirements. There is no linking between a “nut allergy” on a Italian bag of chips to an Australian bag of chips. The analogy falls short.
I agree there needs to be better efforts to explain all parts of the SW to broaden it’s impact, and we really need good use cases, analogies, stories to do it....
Other wise we will end up with the Semantic Web being like a box of chocolates !
Linked Data For the Masses?
In a must-read blog, Brian Kelly looks deeply into Linked Data and asks if we have progressed since 1998 when Tim Berners Lee was looking for a Green Car under $15K here in Queensland.
The results are not what the Semantic Web community would like to see:
“the similarly trivial question which Tim Berners-Lee used back in 1998 – Is there a green car for sale for around $15000 in Queensland? – was perhaps responsible for misleading people into thinking the Semantic Web was for ordinary end users. I am now starting to wonder whether a better strategy for those involved in Linked Data activities would be to purposely distance it from typical end users and target, instead, identified niche areas.”
This resonates with my first blog:
“Could the Semantic Web be harmful? It could if it continues to steer resources towards an unobtainable goal in web-scale terms. Such resources could be used to provide more grass-roots level solutions”
We still have a long way to go....