Seeking a Semantic Web Sweet Spot

Seeking a Semantic Web Sweet Spot AI3:::Adaptive Information.

Reference Structures Provide a Third Way

Since the first days of the Web there has been an ideal that its content could extend beyond documents and become a global, interoperating storehouse of data. This ideal has become what is known as the “semantic Web“. And within this ideal there has been a tension between two competing world views of how to achieve this vision. At the risk of being simplistic, we can describe these world views as informal v formal, sometimes expressed as “bottom up” v “top down” [1,2].

The informal view emphasizes freeform and diversity, using more open tagging and a bottoms-up approach to structuring data [3]. This group is not anarchic, but it does support the idea of open data, open standards and open contributions. This group tends to be oriented to RDF and is (paradoxically) often not very open to non-RDF structured data forms (as, for example, microdata or microformats). Social networks and linked data are quite central to this group. RDFa, tagging, user-generated content and folksonomies are also key emphases and contributions.

The formal view tends to support more strongly the idea of shared vocabularies with more formalized semantics and design. This group uses and contributes to open standards, but is also open to proprietary data and structures. Enterprises and industry groups with standard controlled vocabularies and interchange languages (often XML-based) more typically reside in this group. OWL and rules languages are more often typically the basis for this group’s formalisms. The formal view also tends to split further into two camps: one that is more top down and engineering oriented, with typically a more closed world approach to schema and ontology development [4]; and a second that is more adaptive and incremental and relies on an open world approach [5].

Again, at the risk of being simplistic, the informal group tends to view many OWL and structured vocabularies, especially those that are large or complex, as over engineered, constraining or limiting freedom. This group often correctly points to the delays and lack of adoption associated with more formal efforts. The informal group rarely speaks of ontologies, preferring to use the term of vocabularies. In contrast, the formal group tends to view bottoms-up efforts as chaotic, poorly structured and too heterogeneous to allow machine reasoning or interoperability. Some in the formal group sometimes advocate certification or prescribed training programs for ontologists.

Readers of this blog and customers of Structured Dynamics know that we more often focus on the formal world view and more specifically from an open world perspective. But, like human tribes or different cultures, there is n

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Related articles

• The Top 4 Myths About Semantic Web (digitalassetmanagement.org.uk)
• Semantics in Practice (digitalassetmanagement.org.uk)