Semantic Web Asteism

It seems only fair that if I'm taking next week to go to the Semantic Technology conference in California, I should be able to explain to my wife why it is that I'm going. The problem I have is that she asks technology people razor-sharp questions for a living, so it doesn't work to try to fudge the explanations. Although I've been writing here about the "Semantic Web" for a while now, I've been fudging about what it is I'm writing about and why I think it's important.

There are two words to talk about. The first is "semantic". Hidden within the word semantic is an asteism (word of the day: an asteism is a polite irony; a backhanded compliment). It's the same asteism inherent in the whole field of "artificial intelligence". To use the term "artificial intelligence" is to imply that machines are stupid. "Semantics" is the study of meaning, and to use the term "semantic web" seems to imply that the plain ol' web is devoid of meaning. What is really meant is that the plain ol' web is meaningless to those stupid machines. So the core idea of the Semantic Web is not just that meaning can and should be published, consumed and reused, it's that meaning can and should be published, consumed and reused... by machines.

The second word to talk about is "web". Note that the word is not "space" or "universe" or "world", each of which would have meant something useful and interesting. It's "web", a set of points connected by threads, which can be traversed and which can catch things. It's another asteism about the monolithicity and lack of connectedness of the semantic technology of today. Distribution is inherent in the word "web"; loading information into a big datase of facts is not a web. But the implicit question is what are the points that are being connected? The implicit answer again is "machines", but that, I think, is missing the point. Machines are not interested in meaning; they act as proxies for entities that really are interested in meaning- people, organizations, businesses, governments, schools.

So here's my answer. The Semantic Web is to be a social construct for the automated, distributed, publication consumption and reuse of meaning.

Note that I say "is to be" rather than "is". It is not clear to me whether or not the Semantic Web exists in a working or even incipient form today. It is clear to me, however, that the the Semantic Web must first and foremost be a social construct.

Whenever you see a discussion of the semantic web, there tends to be a lot of discussion about technology- RDF, OWL, tuples, microformats, and things like that. I've come to realize that equating the Semantic Web with those things is like equating the Roman Empire with legions, triremes, siege engines, arches, and roads. The Roman Empire used these instruments to exert power, of course, but that's not how it spread thoughout the western world. The Roman Empire was a social construct. In exchange for accepting Roman dominion and Roman Law, societies obtained the benefits of culture, communication and commerce. (Of course, if they chose not to, they were enslaved, but let's not take the analogy too far!)

The Internet has acheived global dominion using a construct analogous to that of the early Roman Empire. Participation in the Internet Empire requires acceptance of some basic rules (articulated by the IETF rather than the Roman Senate) and the benefits of participation clearly outweigh the costs. Instead of Latin, we have HTML and HTTP. The benefits received - culture, communication and commerce, are exactly the same.

The Semantic Web, by contrast, is still searching for a way to make its social construct an obvious benefit to all of its participants. If meaning and knowledge are valuable, then people will not be motivated to participate in a construct that only enables the distribution of that value. In particular, entities that expend effort to build and maintain the largest and truest stores of meaning and knowledge will have little incentive to participate.

In my last post, I talked about Google Fusion Tables and highlighted the attention that the designers paid to collaboration, control, and attribution. The reason I was excited is that Google Fusion Tables helped me imagine a world in which the Semantic Web social construct could deliver clear value to its participants and become a pervasive benefit to everyone.
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Linked Data vs. Google Fusion Tables

Wouldn't it be cool if you had an idea for a collection of data and there was a way you could set up the database and then invite people to contribute data to the collection, visualize the collection, re-use the collection, and link it to other collections of data?

I think it's really cool, and its also the idea behind Linked Open Data, an initiative of the W3C's semantic web activity. The Linked Data people have amassed an impressive array of datasets available in the RDF xml format, and by using a foundation of URIs as global identifiers, they've enabled these datasets to be linked together. I've been reading a really good explanation of how to publish linked data. But you know what? I have never actually made any data collections available via linked open data. It seems cool, but I'm not sure I would ever be able to get anyone to help me build a data set using Linked Open Data. Linked Open Data seems designed for machines, and there seems to be very little infrastructure that could help me collaborate with other people with common interests in building data sets.

This morning, I set up an online database for twitter conference hashtags, using the data I collected for my last posting about conference hashtags. I used a "pre-alpha" service from Google Labs called "Google Fusion Tables". If you have a gmail account, you can view the table yourself, export the data, and visualize it in various ways. If you email me, I'll authorize you to add records yourself. It would be nice if I could make the table visible to people without gmail accounts, but I assume that's what they mean by "pre-alpha".

Pre-alpha is a good description. I found two bugs in a half hour of working with Google Fusion Tables, but I got e-mail from the developers acknowledging the problems within an hour of reporting the problems, so I wouldn't be surprising if the bugs get squashed very rapidly. (For example, some cells had problems getting edits saved.) From the Linked Open Data point of view, Fusion Tables is very disappointing, as it doesn't seem to be aware (from the outside) of semantic web technologies.

My experience has been that technology is never the real problem, and that building social practice around the technology is always the key to making a technology successful. The Fusion Tables team appears to have looked at the social practice aspect very carefully. Every row in the database, and every cell in every row can be annotated with a conversation and attached to an authorship. These features seem to me to be fundamental requirements for building a collaborative database, and they're annoyingly hard to do using so-called semantic technologies.

The visualizations available hint at some possibilities for Fusion Tables. For example, records can be visualized on a map using geographical location. It's easy to imagine how visualizations and data-typing could be the carrot that gets data set creators to adopt globally known predicates. An ISBN data type could trigger joins to book related data, for example. Or perhaps a zoology oriented dataset could be joined via genus and species to organism-oriented visualizations. Fusion Tables doesn't expose any URI identifiers, but it's hard to say what's going on inside it. In stark contrast, Linked Data sites tend to really hit you in the face with URI's, and it's really hard to explain to people why URI's belong in their databases.

A lot of the posts I've seen on Fusion Tables seem to miss its focus on collaboration, and the types of social practice that it might able to support. Just as Wikipedia has created a new social practice around encyclopedia development and maintenance, there is a possibility that Fusion Tables may be able to engender a new and powerful social practice around the collaborative maintenance of record-oriented databases. If that happens, companies in the database development business could find themselves going the way of Encyclopedia Britannica and World Book in the not so far-off future.
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