Stefano
Mazzocchi, via his blog: Stefano's
Linotype, delivers insightful
contribution to the ongoing effort to recapture the essence of
the original Semantic Web
vision.
The Semantic Web is about granular exposure of the underlying
web-of-data that fuels the World Wide Web. It models "Web Data" using a Directed
Graph Data Model (back-to-the-future: Network Model
Database) called RDF.
In line with contemporary database technology thinking, the
Semantic Web also seeks to expose Web Data to architects,
developers, and users via a concrete Conceptual
Layer that is defined using RDF Schema.
The abstract nature of Conceptual Models implies that actual
instance data (Entities,
Attributes, and Relationships/Associations) occurs by way of
"Logical to Conceptual" schema mapping and data generation that can
involve a myriad of logical data sources (SQL, XML, Object
databases, traditional web content, RSS/Atom
feeds etc.). Thus, by implication, it is safe assume that the
Semantic Web's construction is basically a Data
Integration and exposure effort. The point that Stefano alludes
to in the blog post excerpts that follow:
The semantic web is really just data integration at a global
scale. Some of this data might end up being consistent, detailed
and small enough to perform symbolic reasoning on, but even if this
is the case, that would be such a small, expensive and fragile
island of knowledge that it would have the same impact on the world
as calculus had on deciding to invade Iraq.
The biggest problem we face right now is a way to 'link'
information that comes from different sources that can scale to
hundreds of millions of statements (and hundreds of thousands of
equivalences). Equivalences and subclasses are the only things that
we have ever needed of OWL and RDFS, we want to
'connect' dots that otherwise would be unconnected. We want to
suggest people to use whatever ontology pleases them and then think
of just mapping it against existing ones later. This is easier to
bootstrap than to force them to agree on a conceptualization before
they even know how to start!
Additional insightful material from Stefano:
-
A
No-Nonsense Guide to Semantic Web Specs for XML People [Part
I]
-
A
No-nonsense Guide to Semantic Web Specs for XML People [Part
II]
Benjamin Nowack also
chimes into this conversation via his simple guide to
understanding Data, Information, and Knowledge in relation so
the Semantic Web.