SWC: Bernhard, you have been working on the Semantic Web and Linked Data for years now. What is the first lesson you usually give when you try to explain the “Semantic Web”?

Maybe I should first clarify that the course I am co-teaching is not a Semantic Web course. The course is about data-centric Web information systems in general and we spent some classes talking about Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies. We start explaining the origins and the fundamental architectural principles of the World Wide Web and then focus on the data-centric aspects of the Web.

“instead of building isolated repository-centric APIs we could also build a globally connected data graph”

After introducing various data exchange formats (XML, JSON & co.) we teach how Web APIs work, and discuss the design principles of RESTful Web Services. Then the conceptual transition to Linked Data is just a small step, because we can argue that instead of building isolated repository-centric APIs we could also build a globally connected data graph, which is based on a uniform data model and can be traversed and queried using SPARQL.

“DBpedia and all the other existing Linked Data projects and tools that came up in recent years really help in explaining and illustrating how things work”

So, I am somehow approaching the “Semantic Web” bottom-up and concentrate on the “visible” parts of the “Semantic Web” vision. DBpedia and all the other existing Linked Data projects and tools that came up in recent years really help in explaining and illustrating how things work. And last but not least, schema.org and the design of the Facebook Open Graph protocol also show the growing importance of having structured data on the Web.

SWC: At least for non-technicians “Linked Data” sounds very technical. Antoine de Saint-Exupery said: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” Is there an “endless immensity of the sea” you try to bring in as well?

If you can access and combine data from the Web you can answer interesting questions and discover previously unknown relationships between things. We thought the best way to learn about Linked Data is to implement simple demo applications. So we asked the students to think about uses cases that bring some benefit for end users and require data from several Web sources to answer certain questions.

“I think it became clear what it means to work with easily accessible structured Web data opposed to working with unstructured data”

One group developed a service which connects safety records with public transport information. Now users can now easily choose the “safest” bus connection between from and to New York City and other cities. Another group combined public school district information with geographic data, which now allows parents to view statistical information about school districts in New York State by using apps like Google Earth. There are many more examples, but most importantly, I think it became clear what it means to work with easily accessible structured Web data opposed to working with unstructured data.

SWC: Instructing how to use the Semantic Web is not only a matter of slide-decks. It is rather a question of concrete use cases in combination with tool skills. What kind of tool skills should students of information sciences acquire to your opinion?

Collecting and making sense out of data is a common scholarly practice in many research areas and the Web is becoming, or is already, the primary medium for publishing and distributing results. I believe that making data accessible as part of a some research activity will become increasingly important in future and the Web will probably be infrastructure for doing this.

So I think that a student who is working with data should at least know (i) how to retrieve and (ii) how to publish data on the Web in way that others can easily discover, access, and use their data. Linked Data is one possible technical approach for doing that.

SWC: As a European who is teaching and working in the U.S., how do you perceive the different approaches between those two systems when it comes to transfer complex fields of knowledge like the semantic web from universities to business environments?

From the experiences I have made in my previous and current working environments I can only tell that the relations between businesses and universities seem to be tighter in the US. I don’t necessarily mean “formal” bounds between institutions but rather informal relations between people, who understand complex fields of knowledge, both in the academia and in business.

“I assume transferring knowledge between two proxies who speak the same ‘language’ makes it a lot easier”

PhD students, for instance, often work in business over the summer and/or continue their career in the research department of some company. Some continue their cooperation with their former professors and academic colleagues and I assume transferring knowledge between two proxies who speak the same “language” makes it a lot easier.

SWC: What are the most important things which are still missing to make linked data technologies an integral part of enterprise information systems?

Quite often I hear the complaint that major database vendors still don’t provide satisfactory RDF support in their products. I don’t think this is a necessary precondition for implementing Linked Data but for some institutions this seems to be very important.

Many thanks!

Related articles

• Linked Learning 2012, collocated with WWW2012 (linkededucation.wordpress.com)
• W3C Library Linked Data Reports (ivan-herman.name)

His talk is a plaidoyer for an open internet, that works independent from central control  and political implications, on top of open standards AND net neutrality. This is especially relevant when it comes to open data, where the social machinery of the web will help to improve many flaws democracy is facing today.

So, what are the implications: Study Web Science! And trigger gentle, non-violent change!

It was a pleasure to listen!

Marco, you recently initiated a discussion in a Google Group on the difficulty to change Semantic Web standards. What was the background of the discussion? Where do you perceive a need for action?

It’s not so much about changing this existing standards but the challenge to bring them into the world of practitioners and standards developers. The language used in W3C recommendations quite frequently requires advanced topic knowledge and familiarity with the jargon of the discussion about the respective technologies. I recently discussed this with a senior standards maven at the W3C and got the answer that the recommendations can’t be changed retrospectively and that they are intended to be used primarily by vendors for implementation purposes.

Well this might be the case but I also got the impression that Tim Berners-Lee objective for the W3C is primarily to meet the needs of a larger community. And the W3C took this into account for most of the Semantic Web recommendations in the past. Something I still find amazing is the fact that the work process at the W3C is partially and the recommendations are entirely publicly accessible. Though we definitely still need more and better tools to work with semantic web data, higher quality documentation and last but not least more user adoption on the web.

Critics of the Semantic Web often refer to the slow uptake of Semantic Web standards by industry. Is standards adoption actually a valid and sufficient metric to evaluate the maturity of a standard? What would be needed to accelerate the uptake?

I think we might see a similar scenario to the uptake of HTML in the early 90s, a relatively small number of technology mavens will pave the way towards making the Semantic Web more attractive as a technology solution for a wide range of applications and will successfully publish open data before we see business application developers make use of Semantic Web standards.

The availability of trustable and quality approved RDF data is crucial for the success of the Semantic Web. Given the fact that the aggregation business on the WWW is highly concentrated the corresponding formula is simple: If Google just consumes but does not give back RDF the Semantic Web won’t scale. Do you agree?

Yes and no. Yes we need better and more semantic data on the Web, but we will also need better ways to deal with trust in a lightweight and web friendly fashion. I currently see a number of semi automated approaches emerging  that could scale on the web. An example are distributed user based recommendation systems to validate authenticity, open Wikipedia style community evaluation and content curation a la freebase. Increased public accountability for data producers might be an interesting venue as well. In regards to Google I’d say web search engines will go where the web goes. A problem I might see arising is that web search engines will initially develop their own standards to deal with the emerging Semantic Web and confuse users on the web or might pursue a time consuming power play with the W3C. I see a little bit of that in the current discussion in the HTML 5 working group.

As we know from social sciences technological standards are necessary but always incomplete and unsatisfactory. From a standards design and outreach perspective: What would it need to make the Semantic Web flourish?

I’m not sure if we really know all that much about the laws of innovation and the evolution of technology standards at this point. If we draw from the short experience with the World Wide Web I would come to the conclusion that innovation takes place in small to medium size teams that pursue an independent vision of how services should be delivered and how the technology should be designed. In addition Tim Berners-Lee’s encourages the production of lots and lots of data to bootstrap the Semantic Web and create a pull for services in the industry. And indeed we really see some traction for example with the Linked Open Data and Open Government initiatives. It’s definitely an exciting time to be on the Semantic Web!

About Marco Neumann

Marco Neumann is an Information Scientist and CEO of KONA a consulting and technology service company based in New York City. KONA provides semantic technologies to businesses solutions and adds value to products and services in a highly networked economy. In addition Marco currently acts as an Invited Expert to the W3C on the HTML 5 working group and is the director of the global semantic social network lotico.com.

The answer to me is that database and data are different.  They’re different legally and different practically in what consumers and producers of open data want to do with it.  They’re also different in what the future looks like in terms of things like linked data.

Read the details in the full interview.

With the vision of the web of data Topic Maps and the Semantic Web move closer over time. Anywhere URIs represent subjects, structured statements are gathered around them. In this context I see subj3ct.com as an interesting ventures. This recently launched service provides URIs for 15 million subjects to be used in structured data. Naturally, linked data hubs like dbpedia or geonames.org are part of it. The crowd is invited to contribute to this collection, also the Topic Maps Lab provides several feeds to register new URIs. Subj3ct.com turns out to be an infrastructure technology for Web 3.0 applications, regardless whether they are based on Topic Maps or other Semantic Web technologies.

Through this convergence the uniqueness of each technology sharpens. Reasoning is the strong point of the Semantic Web. But the strength of Topic Maps are semantic portals and the global federation of facts around subjects. Bringing together all and even contradictory information about each subject – and not building reasoning-ready consistent models of the world – is built into the genes of Topic Maps.

Read the full interview here.

The high-level societal goal of the project SeSaMe is to facilitate home owners or building managers in saving energy within their environments and in optimizing their energy costs, while actively controlling and maintaining their preferred quality of living. Therefore an international consortium of five partners was formed bringing together various competencies and fields of expertise.

We have set up a project blog, where you will find more information on the topic soon.

Posted by John Klossner on Aug 03, 2009

For those of you, like me, who need a way to keep these things straight, I offer the following handy, wallet-sized program.

WEB 1.0 (browsers) – Users find data
WEB 2.0 (social networks) – Users find each other
WEB 3.0 (semantic Web) – Data find each other

Of course, a lifetime of science-fiction reading and viewing leads me to fear we can look forward to the following developments:

WEB 4.0 – Data create their own Facebook page, restrict friends.
WEB 5.0 – Data decide they can work without humans, create their own language.
WEB 6.0 –Human users realize that they no longer can find data unless invited by data.
WEB 7.0 – Data get cheaper cell phone rates.
WEB 8.0 – Data horde all the good YouTube videos, leaving human users with access to bad ’80′s music videos only.
WEB 9.0 – Data create and maintain own blogs, are more popular than human blogs.
WEB 10.0 – All episodes of Battlestar Gallactica will now be shown from the Cylons’ point of view.

The scientific keynotes will be provided by Paolo Traverso, Director of the Center for Information Technology – IRST, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy, and Professor Eric Tsui, Associate Director of the Knowledge Management Research Centre, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China.

The industry keynote will be held by Peter Kropsch, CEO of the Austrian Press Agency.

Further details will follow.

As journalist and communications-professional I came acoss an article that I – although in German – have to recommend from the depth of my heart to everybody who is somehow concerned with communication. It´s an article on propaganda in the prestigious brandeins-magazine. Here´s a german commentary on it.

Communications and public relations are at least as complex as the Semantic Web is and it´s not accidental that both of them deal with language. Ludwig Wittgenstein had claimed comprehension by talking about truth tables and anybody who deals with communication should act more explicit in terms of getting more understanding.

So, instead, let me give you some web search problems. They all came up in my real life, so they are not artificially created. It seems to me that the Semantic Web should make answering them easier, but with the existing web resources, they are really difficult.

• Find all papers having received best paper awards at ISWC conferences. I did that today, and it took me more than 30 minutes. And I’m not sure if I got all of them – indeed I would have missed one of them if I hadn’t known beforehand about that specific paper having received the award. Isn’t this a typical Semantic Web problem? (The results of my search are further below.)
• There’s an owl-like bird in southern German woods, and in colloquial german it’s called Käuzchen. Try to find out the english name for this bird. I actually failed, though I think I got close to the answer when I merged web search with an external knowledge base (in form of a biologist I happen to know). And actually, simply going to Wikipedia and clicking on the English link is not enough, since I’m not looking for the Strix genus of owls, but rather for a particular bird …
• Who is this researcher with the russian looking name who worked on resolution-based methods for the description logic EL? This also looks like a typical Semantic Search problem, which shouldn’t be too difficult if you have the corresponding knowledge (and background knowledge) available. I admit I failed on this one using traditional methods (unless you consider it a traditional method to ask Franz Baader by email about it.)
• Are lobsters spiders? I.e. are lobsters classified as spiders by biologists? This one is actually tougher than you would think using traditional methods. Should be easy using Semantic Web knowledge bases and some simple reasoning, shouldn’t it?

For all these tasks (and many others), it seems to be apparent that Semantic Web Reasoning – and the availability of corresponding knowledge bases – would make the finding of answers much easier. The current reality of the Semantic Web is still quite a bit away from this. But we’re working on it.

Finally, as promised, the results of my inquiry about the ISWC best paper awards:

• 2004: Y. Guo, Z. Pan, and J. Heflin, An Evaluation of Knowledge Base Systems for Large OWL Datasets.  This one compares different semantic web reasoners.
• 2005: The award was split that year. One half was awarded to P. Mika, Ontologies Are Us: A Unified Model of Social Networks and Semantics. The other half was awarded to B. Motik, On the Properties of Metamodeling in OWL. Edit: Apologies to Peter Mika. I accidently forgot his paper and mentioned instead a paper which won the best paper award at the International Symposium on Wearable Computers 2005, which is also abbreviated ISWC. It’s now been corrected. We definitely need Semantic Search!
• 2006: H. Chen, Y. Wang, H. Wang, Y. Mao, J. Tang, C. Zhou, A. Yin, Z. Wu, Towards a Semantic Web of Relational Databases: a Practical Semantic Toolkit and an In-Use Case from Traditional Chinese Medicine.
• 2007: D. Zeginis, Y. Tzitzikas and V. Christophides, On the Foundations of Computing Deltas Between RDF Models. This one is about a diff for RDF, and it involves RDF inferencing.
• 2008: M. Horridge, B. Parsia and U. Sattler, Laconic and Precise Justifications in OWL.

So why did I dig these awards out? Because I noticed that among these 6 papers there are 3 which are explicitly concerned with OWL. And the 2007 paper involves RDF inferencing. Talk about the importance of reasoning for the Semantic Web …

Author: Pascal Hitzler, AIFB, University of Karlsruhe (TH), Germany