Here’s an excellent, concise presentation by Tom Llube explaining the Semantic Web at the Davos economic forum.
Transcription below:
A revolution is happening in the structure of the web itself. It’s gentle and it’s powerful, it’s like tai-chi: you hardly know that is happening, but when it hits, it has a massive impact.
That’s what the semantic web is about.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web about 20 years ago, and 5 years later he started working about what the next generation of the web was going to be. His vision of the Web was more powerful than the Web we have today.
Now it has come to fruition, and he called it the Semantic Web.
A Web of meaning and understanding: semantics IS about meaning and understanding.
Until the Web becomes a Web of understanding, we won’t really realize its potential.
It’s about moving from a Web of documents to a Web of data, where the data carries with it the meaning of each item of data.
It doesn’t rely on understanding the documents. The data carries its own meaning and expresses that meaning.
That’s what it happens with a Web of Linked Data.
The Web as we know it today, the Web of documents, is about linking one documents to another. The language is HTML, is created for people who browse, people having an understanding of the context, they don’t need to be told what the context is.
The Semantic Web is designed for programs, for applications to be able to access the Web. Applications need to be told what the context is.
The language is RDF: we move away from HTML, to RDF; and we end up with a network at the data level, instead of the document level.
The meaning is expressed through relationships: “Joe is the parent of Emily”. That’s a relationship, and it carries a lot of data with it.
It’s a triple: everything in the semantic web is described as triples – subject, predicate, object.
The whole semantic web is a network of triples: “Joe – loves – football”.
So what you end up with is a Web of data, and in those triples between data is the meaning and understanding.
How many of these things exist today? As far as we can tell, there’s something like 23 billion triples of information scattered around the Web, written in RDF.
It’s happening and you don’t even know about it: you can’t see it, you can’t browse it, but there are 23 billions of triples that grew by a factor of 50 in the last year.
It will cover people (and it does today), music, sports, photos, facts-data, location-data…
What are the implications, what a search look like in a semantic web world, in a Web of Linked Data?
It doesn’t look like Google, it doesn’t look like keywords search driven by advertising. That has no relevance in a semantic web world. The Google algorithms make no sense in a world of data.
What it looks like for shopping? On Amazon, you won’t see a single destination site that you go and visit, when the entire semantic web is like one huge destination site, with all the products made explicit by programs that connect us.
What a social network will look like? It doesn’t look like Facebook, it doesn’t look like a huge walled garden. Social networks also will have to change.
So, we’re moving. There’s a quiet revolution, you may not realize that is happening, until it just hits your business in the face.
We’re moving from documents to data, from pages to triples, from HTML to RDF, from keyword to context.
Last words to Sir Tim Berners-Lee:
When we look back we’ll say: “Oh my goodness, the original web of documents was just the tip of the iceberg”. (July 2008).
