Making

Sense
of the
Semantic
Web

Nova Spivack
CEO & Founder
Radar Networks

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About This Talk

• Making sense of the semantic sector

• Making the Semantic Web more useable

• Future outlook

• Twine.com

•Q & A

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The Big Opportunity…

The social graph just connects people

The semantic graph connects everything…

People

Companies Emails
Better search

Places Products More targeted ads

Smarter collaboration
Interests Services
Deeper integration
Activities Web Pages
Richer content

Projects Documents Better personalization

Events Multimedia
Groups

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The third decade of the Web

• A period in time, not a technology…

• Enrich the structure of the Web

• Improve the quality of search, collaboration, publishing,
advertising
• Enables applications to become more integrated and
intelligent

• Transform Web from fileserver to database

• Semantic technologies will play a key role

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 The Intelligence is in the Connections

Intelligent Web
Connections between Information

Web OS Web 4.0

2020 - 2030
Intelligent personal agents
Semantic Web Web 3.0 Distributed Search
SWRL
OWL 2010 - 2020
SPARQL Semantic Databases
OpenID AJAX
Semantic Search
Social Web RSS
ATOM Widgets
P2P RDF Mashups
Office 2.0
Javascript
SOAP XML
Flash Web 2.0
The Web Java 2000 - 2010 Weblogs Social Media Sharing
HTML
HTTP SaaS Social Networking
Directory Portals Wikis
VR
Keyword Search Lightweight Collaboration
The PC BBS Gopher Web 1.0 Websites
1990 - 2000
MMO’s MacOS SQL
Groupware
SGML Databases
Windows
File Servers
The Internet
PC Era
FTP IRC Email 1980 - 1990
USENET
PC’s File Systems

Connections between people

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 Beyond the Limits of Keyword Search
Productivity of Search

The Intelligent Web

Web 4.0
2020 - 2030 Reasoning

The Semantic Web

Web 3.0
2010 - 2020
Semantic Search

The Social Web

Natural language search

The World Wide Web

Web 2.0
2000 - 2010
Tagging
Web 1.0
1990 - 2000
Keyword search
The Desktop
Directories
PC Era
1980 - 1990
Files & Folders

Databases

Amount of data
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A Higher Resolution Web

IBM.com
Joe Lives in Web Site
Person Palo Alto IBM
City Company
Publisher of

Fan of
Subscriber to Lives in
Employee of

Sue
Fan of Jane Person
Dave.com Person Friend of
RSS Feed Coldplay
Band Member
of
Depiction of
Married to
Source of Design
Member
Team
of
Group
123.JPG
Dave.com Bob Photo
Weblog Person Depiction of
Member of

Member of
Author of Stanford
Dave
Alumnae
Person
Group
Member of

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Five Approaches to Semantics

• Tagging

• Statistics

• Linguistics

• Semantic Web

• Artificial Intelligence

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The Tagging Approach

• Pros • Technorati
• Easy for users to add and read
tags • Del.icio.us
• Tags are just strings

• No algorithms or ontologies to
deal with • Flickr
• No technology to learn

• Wikipedia
• Cons
• Easy for users to add and read
tags
• Tags are just strings

• No algorithms or ontologies to
deal with
• No technology to learn

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The Statistical Approach

• Pros: • Google
• Pure mathematical algorithms
• Massively scaleable
• Lucene
• Language independent

• Autonomy
• Cons:
• No understanding of the
content
• Hard to craft good queries

• Best for finding really popular

things – not good at finding
needles in haystacks
• Not good for structured data

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The Linguistic Approach

• Pros: • Powerset
• True language understanding
• Extract knowledge from text
• Hakia
• Best for search for particular
facts or relationships
• More precise queries • Inxight, Attensity, and
others…
• Cons:
• Computationally intensive
• Difficult to scale

• Lots of errors

• Language-dependent

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The Semantic Web Approach

• Pros: • Radar Networks

• More precise queries
• Smarter apps with less work
• DBpedia Project
• Not as computationally
intensive
• Share & link data between apps
• Metaweb
• Works for both unstructured
and structured data

• Cons:
• Lack of tools
• Difficult to scale

• Who makes all the metadata?

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The Artificial Intelligence Approach

• Pros: • Cycorp
• Smart in narrow domains
• Answer questions intelligently

• Reasoning and learning

• Cons:
• Computationally intensive
• Difficult to scale

• Extremely hard to program

• Does not work well outside of

narrow domains
• Training takes a lot of work

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The Approaches Compared

Make the Data Smarter

A.I.

Semantic
Web

Linguistics

Tagging
Statistics

Make the software smarter

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Two Paths to Adding Semantics

• “Bottom-Up” (Classic)
• Add semantic metadata to pages and databases all over the Web
• Every Website becomes semantic

• Everyone has to learn RDF/OWL

• “Top-Down” (Contemporary)
• Automatically generate semantic metadata for vertical domains
• Create services that provide this as an overlay to non-semantic
Web
• Nobody has to learn RDF/OWL

-- Alex Iskold

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In Practice: Hybrid Approach Works Best

Tagging
Semantic Web
Top-down
Statistics
Linguistics
Bottom-up
Artificial intelligence
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The Semantic Web is a Key Enabler

• Moves the “intelligence” out of applications, into

the data

• Data becomes self-describing; Meaning of data

becomes part of the data

• Apps can become smarter with less work, because

the data carries knowledge about what it is and
how to use it

• Data can be shared and linked more easily

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The Semantic Web = Open database layer for the Web

User Web Ads & Data Apps &

Profiles Content Listings Records Services

Open Query Interfaces

Open Data Mappings

Open Data Records

Open Rules

Open Ontologies
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Semantic Web Open Standards

• RDF – Store data as “triples”

• OWL – Define systems of concepts called

“ontologies”

• Sparql – Query data in RDF

• SWRL – Define rules

• GRDDL – Transform data to RDF

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RDF “Triples”

Subj Predicate Obj

ect ect

• the subject, which is an RDF URI reference or a blank node

• the predicate, which is an RDF URI reference

• the object, which is an RDF URI reference, a literal or a

blank node

Source: http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-concepts/#section-triples

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Semantic Web Data is Self-Describing Linked Data

Ontologies Definition

Definition

Definition
Definition

Data Record ID
Definition
Field 1 Value

Field 2 Value

Definition Field 3 Value

Field 4 Value

Definition

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RDBMS vs Triplestore

Person Table
S P O Subject Predicate Object
ID f_name l_name 001 isA Person
001 firstName Jim
001 jim wissner 001 lastName Wissner
002 nova spivack 001 hasColleague 002
003 chris jones 002 isA Person
004 lew tucker 002 firstName Nova
002 lastName Spivack
002 hasColleague 003
003 isA Person
003 firstName Chris
Colleagues Table 003 lastName Jones
003 hasColleague 004
SRC-ID TGT-ID 004 isA Person
001 001 004 firstName Lew
001 002 004 lastName Tucker
001 003
001 004
002 001
002 002
002 003
002 004
003 001
003 002
003 003
003 004
004 001
004 002
004 003
004 004

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Merging Databases in RDF is Easy

S P O S P O S P O

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The Web IS the Database!

Application A Application B

IBM.com
Web Site
Joe
Person Lives in Palo Alto IBM
City Company

Publisher of

Fan of
Subscriber to Lives in
Employee of
Sue
Jane Person
Dave.com Person
Fan of
RSS Feed Coldplay
Friend of
Band
Memb
er of

Depiction of
Design
Married to
Team
Source of Group Member
of 123.JPG
Dave.com Bob Photo
Weblog Person

Depiction of
Member of

Stanford Member of
Dave
Author of Alumnae
Person
Group

Member of

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Are RDF/OWL the Only Way to Express Semantics?

• Other contenders:
• Stringtags
• Taxonomies and controlled vocabularies

• Microformats

• Ad hoc [name, value] pairs

• Alternative semantic metadata notations

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One Semantic Web or Many?

• The answer is….Both

• The Semantic Web is a web of semantic webs

• Each of us may have our own semantic web…

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Why has it Taken So Long?

• The Dream of the Semantic Web has been slow to arrive

• The original vision was too focused on A.I.

• Technologies and tools were insufficient

• Needs for open data on the Web were not strong enough

• Keyword search and tagging were good enough…for a while

• Lack of end-user facing killer apps

• Lots of misunderstanding to clear up

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Crossing the Chasm…

• Communicating the vision

• Focus on open data, not A.I.

• Technology progress
• Standards & tools finally maturing

• Needs were not strong enough

• Keyword search and tagging not as productive anymore
• Apps need better way to share data

• Killer apps and content

• Several companies are starting to expose data to the Semantic
Web. Soon there will be a lot of data.

• Market Education
• Show the market what the benefits are
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Future Outlook

• 2007 – 2009
• Early-Adoption
• A few killer apps emerge

• Other apps start to integrate

• 2010 – 2020
• Mainstream Adoption
• Semantics widely used in Web content and apps

• 2020 +
• Next big cycle: Reasoning and A.I.
• The Intelligent Web

• The Web learns and thinks collectively

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The Future of the Platform…

• 1980’s -- The desktop is the platform

• 1990’s -- The browser is the platform

• 2000’s -- The Web is the platform

• 2010’s -- The Graph is the platform

• 2020’s -- The network is the platform

• 2030’s -- The body is the platform…?

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A Mainstream Application of
the Semantic Web…

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What is Twine?

• Twine is a new service for managing & sharing

information on the Web

• Works for content, knowledge, data, or any other

kinds of information

• Designed for individuals and groups that need a

better way to organize, search, share and keep track
of their information

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How Twine Works

1. Collect or author structured or unstructured information

into Twine via email, the Web or the desktop

2. Twine creates a knowledge web automatically

• Understands, tags & links information automatically
• Automatically does further research for you on the Web
• Organizes information automatically

1. Provides semantic search, discovery & interest tracking

2. Helps you connect with other people & groups to grow

and share knowledge webs around common interests

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Use-Cases

• Individuals
• Collect& author information about interests
• Share with your friends & colleagues

• Find and discover things more relevantly

• Groups & Teams

• Manage content & knowledge related to
common interests, goals, or activities
• Leverage and contribute to collective
intelligence
• Collaborate more productively
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Contact Info

• Visit www.twine.com to sign up for the invite beta

wait-list

• You can email me at nova@radarnetworks.com

• My blog is at http://www.mindingtheplanet.net

• Thanks!

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Rights

• This presentation is licensed under the Creative Commons

Attribution License.
• Details: This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported
License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco,
California, 94105, USA.

• If you reproduce or redistribute in whole or in part, please give

attribution to Nova Spivack, with a link to
http://www.mindingtheplanet.net

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