Evolution Towards Web 3.0:

The Semantic WebExperiences and Challenges on the Web and Inside Enterprises

Lee FeigenbaumVP Technology & Client Services, Cambridge Semantics

Co-chair W3C SPARQL Working Grouplee@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

1st image on the Web

Debut of Mosaic browser

• Widespread success of Web 1.0– IMDB.com– PizzaHut.com– Whitehouse.gov– Lycos.com

• Universality: anything can link to anything

• Push information to users

Web Evolution

1994 1999 2004

IE7 has 1st complete AJAX stack

First Web 2.0 ConferenceHighlights User-Generated

Content

2006Web 1.0 is “here”.

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

Penetrating Silos: Building the Data Web

Penetrating Silos: Building the Data Web

Penetrating Silos: Building the Data Web

Penetrating Silos: Building the Data Web

Penetrating Silos: Building the Data Web

Penetrating Silos: Building the Data Web

Web Evolution

1994 20042001 2007Web 1.0 is “here”. Web 2.0 is “here”.

2009

• Semantic Web consumers include Google & Yahoo!

• Semantic Web publishers include Best Buy, NY Times, US and UK gov’ts

Web Evolution

1999 2001 2004 2008 20112007

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.

Names

• 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

Cathy

Relational Technology Semantic TechnologyCustomer Table

Cust ID Name City

394021-1454 Cathy Seattle

Purchased Items Table

Purchase-ID Cust-ID Item

P942-4294 394021-1454 iPad

Based on tablesRigid table stores only the things they’re

designed to storeMeaning (e.g. relationships) must come

from the user or be built into software

Based on a Web of dataCan accommodate new data as it arrivesUnderstandable by human beings & machinesComplements & builds upon traditional IT

purchased iPad

The Semantic Web Paradigm

The World Changes

Traditionally:Change is costly

Semantics:Change is cheap

Semantic Web Paradigm: Coping with Change

Flexible Graph Model

URIs for naming

Agility On-the-fly

RDB 1 RDB 2

Data Silos (structured, semi-structured, unstructured data)

ExcelEmailMySQLSybaseOracle

Integrated Enterprise Data

Response

Response

Response

QueryQuery

Query

…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

Universe of considered

opportunities

High-potentialopportunities Mobile device

RegionalAnalyst

ProfileTerritory Preferredtargets

. . .

Per-analystrelevance filter

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

1. Variable quality of uninterpreted source data– What are the highest cities in the US?

2. 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.com

To learn more or to discuss the contents of this presentation, please contact me.