Evolution Towards Web 3.0: The Semantic Web

Evolution Towards Web 3.0:
The Semantic Web
Experiences and Challenges on the Web and Inside Enterprises
Lee Feigenbaum
VP Technology & Client Services, Cambridge Semantics
Co-chair W3C SPARQL Working Group
lee@cambridgesemantics.com
for “Evolution Towards Web 3.0”, April 21, 2011

Agenda
How did we get here?
Semantic Web: What and why
How is it used today?
Semantic Web challenges

Acknowledgement
Much material used gratefully with permission of Tim Berners-Lee. All opinions and conclusions are Lee Feigenbaum’s.

Web Evolution
1992
1993
1994
Widespread success of Web 1.0
IMDB.com
PizzaHut.com
Whitehouse.gov
Lycos.com
Universality: anything can link to anything
Push information to users
Debut of Mosaic browser
1st image on the Web

Web Evolution
1994
1999
2004
2006
Web 1.0 is “here”.
IE7 has 1st complete AJAX stack
First Web 2.0 Conference
Highlights User-Generated
Content

Building Silos
Web 1.0: The silo is the document

Building Silos
Web 2.0: The silo is the application
Image originally from March 2008 issue of The Economist and used with permission of creator David Simonds

Penetrating Silos: Building the Data Web

Web Evolution
1994
2004
2001
2007
2009
Semantic Web consumers include Google & Yahoo!
Semantic Web publishers include Best Buy, NY Times, US and UK gov’ts

Web Evolution
2001
2004
2008
2011
2007
1999
RIF
16

“The Semantic Web”
Link explicit data on the World Wide Web in a machine-readable fashion
…government data
…commercial data
…social data
In order to enable…
…targeted, semantic search
…data browsing
…automated agents
Semantic Web – 1st view
World Wide Web : Web pages :: The Semantic Web : Data

“Semantic Web technologies”
A family of technology standards that ‘play nice together’, including:
Flexible data model
Expressive ontology language
Distributed query language
Drive Web sites, enterprise applications
Data integration
Business intelligence
Large knowledgebases
…
Semantic Web – 2nd view
The technologies enable us to build applications and solutions that were not possible, practical, or feasible traditionally.

Semantic Web
Web of Data
Giant Global Graph
Data Web
Web 3.0
Linked Data Web
Semantic Data Web
Enterprise Information Web
Branding

Value propositions
On the Web, the Semantic Web is about moving from linking documents to linking data
What’s the value proposition within the enterprise?

Evolution to Semantic Web Inside Enterprises
Relational TechnologySemantic Technology
Cathy
purchased
iPad
Based on tables
Rigid table stores only the things they’re designed to store
Meaning (e.g. relationships) must come from the user or be built into software
Based on a Web of data
Can accommodate new data as it arrives
Understandable by human beings & machines
Complements & builds upon traditional IT

The Semantic Web Paradigm

Semantic Web Paradigm: Coping with Change
The World Changes
Traditionally:
Change is costly
Semantics:
Change is cheap
RDB 1
RDB 2

Integrated
Enterprise
Data
Data Silos(structured, semi-structured, unstructured data)
Excel
Email
MySQL
Sybase
Oracle
…At and Beyond Enterprise Scale

Semantics Puts Data Within Reach of Domain Experts

How is Semantic Web used today?

We’re not here yet.
Image from Trey Ideker via Enoch Huang

What is here today?
Do you use Web 3.0 in your day-to-day life?

The Linked Data Web, May 2007

The Linked Data Web, March 2008
May 12, 2009
31

The Linked Data Web, March 2009
32

The Linked Data Web, September 2010

Semantic Web In Use: Social Data
People, relationships
Friend Of A Friend (“FOAF”) – foaf:knows
Self-published or site-published (LiveJournal, hi5, …)
Blogs, discussion forums, mailing lists
Semantically Interlinked Online Communities (“SIOC”)
Plug-ins for popular blogging & CMS platforms
Calendars, vCards, reviews, …
One-offs
Why don’t we have portable social networks? Yet?

Social Data Example
Facebook Open Graph Protocol

Semantic Web In Use: Scientific Data
May 12, 2009
36

Example: Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery
What genes are involved in signal transduction and are related to pyramidal neurons?

General search: 223,000 hits, 0 results

Domain-limited search: Still 2,580 potential results

Specific databases: Too many silos!

Linked Scientific Data: 32 targeted results

Semantic Web In Use: Enterprises on the Web
Thesis: Describe your business more precisely and drive more (and better) traffic to your site
Example: NYTimes publishes their article classification scheme as linked data
Example: Best Buy, Overstock.com use RDFa to annotate product listings

Measurable Results
30% increase in search-engine traffic
15% increase in click-through-rate for search ads

Many and Varied Applications Across Industries
Health care and pharma
integration, classification, ontologies
Oil & Gas
integration, classification
Finance
structured data, ontologies, XBRL
Publishing
metadata
Libraries & museums
metadata, classification
IT
rapid application development & evolution
Semantic Web In Use: Inside the Enterprise

Targeting High-Potential Opportunities in Pharma
. . .
Profile
Territory
Preferred
targets
Regional
Analyst
Per-analyst
relevance filter
Universe of considered opportunities
High-potential
opportunities
Mobile device

Delivering Dynamic, Data-driven Websites
“
The development of this new high-performance dynamic semantic publishing stack is a great innovation for the BBC as we are the first to use this technology on such a high-profile site. It also puts us at the cutting edge of development for the next phase of the Internet, Web 3.0.

Semantic Web In Use: Government data
Since January 2010, 2,500 (large) datasets published as Linked Data
Since May 2009, 250,000 (smaller) datasets published (CSV, XML, …)
RPI project to convert datasets toLinked Data

Tim Berners-Lee @ TED2010
http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_the_year_open_data_went_worldwide.html

Semantic Web challenges

Companies range from small, family-owned businesses to massive global conglomerates. But the challenges faced by even the largest corporation pale in comparison to the scope of the challenges of building a world-wide Semantic Web.

Economic Model
What sustains Semantic Web applications in industry?
What sustains the Linked Data Web?
Are there viable economic models for Linked Data?

Big Issue: Motivation
Retailers have clear motivation to put their data on the Web. But…
…what if your business is data?
Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, …
…what if your business is your application?
Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, …

Scale
Web
Fortune 100 corp.

Data Quality
Web 1.0 & 2.0 by necessity put a human between the information and its interpretation
Web 3.0 queries, searches, and agents seek to automate this
Data quality is a challenge to automation

Variable quality of uninterpreted source data
What are the highest cities in the US?
Variable quality of links and assertions about Linked Data
Data Quality – Two Issues
405,696,000m

Data Quality – Two Issues
What ensures data quality on the Linked Data Web?
Enterprises spend millions on data quality already
Knowledge management
Master data management
Governance and curation processes
…though data quality issues do seep in when enterprises use Semantic Web to link to partners and public sources of data!

Trust
How do we know which contributions to the Linked Data Web to trust?
Trust (distrust) the contributors?
Trust (distrust) the contributions?
Trust (distrust) the process?
How is trust established within an enterprise’s Linked Data Web?

Adoption
Suggestion: Progress towards enterprise linked data requires far fewer people embrace Semantic Web technologies compared with a global Linked Data Web

Other Challenges
Data licensing
Open world assumption
Unique name assumption
Temporal data
What other challenges can you think of?

lee@cambridgesemantics.comTo learn more or to discuss the contents of this presentation, please contact me.

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Evolution Towards Web 3.0: The Semantic Web

by LeeFeigenbaum

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