Posted December 29th, 2007, in: Semantic Web| Technology

It’s been nearly 3 years since I began to imagine what might be possible if social data was distributed and could serve as a backbone for a new era of Web applications, particularly in the area of Media Discovery.

The closest things to moving in the direction of Distributed Social Networking that we’ve seen so far have been FaceBook’s application platform, and now, Open Social… I say they are closest because they are (or are going to be) actually adopted by the public at large. Of course, they’re both pathetic examples of Openness.

In much of the reading/learning I have done this past year about The Semantic Web, the idea of “Walled Gardens” or “Silos” comes up a lot. I find it so frustrating that the “Web 2.0″ era seems to be all about leasing people ladders. It’s all about maintaining an addiction to access rather than tearing down walls.

The Web 2.0 way seems to me to be:

1. make some catchy little widget.

2. populate it with users (buy registered users if you have to!)

3. sell it, or rather the registered users you’ve acquired to Google or Yahoo or Ebay or Newscorp whomever else is buying eyeballs that day.

It’s an economy based on ‘registered users’ or ‘active users’ or whatever. Basically, Eyeballs. The incentives for development are based on the Silo/Walled Garden approach. I know there are some major exceptions to this, but basically it’s true: Web 2.0 is contrary to a “Web of Data” or Semantic Web because the currency of Web 2.o is “Active Users.”

For this reason, I think that if anything major is going to happen in the way of the Semantic Web finally hitting the streets, it’s going to ride in on the back of a disruptive technology. I mean disruptive of course as in disruptive to the googles, facebooks and myspaces, not to the Web itself or to People.

I realize that the Semantic Web is way bigger than Social Nets, but if we’re going to talk about the SW “becoming real” anytime soon, I think it has to be about Social Software. (And of course, Semantic Web technology is ‘real’ already just not widely used) (and I could be totally wrong of course)

So in response to the quote below, I don’t think 2008 is the year the Semantic Web will become an everyday technology, not after witnessing the last couple years, unless ‘something the kids like’ ushers it in. This stuff is moving so slowly.

Quote from Kurt Cagle over at XML.com

[prediction #5] The Semantic Web Becomes Real. Okay, so maybe I’m getting a little cynical about the semantic web myself, perhaps because too much of it of late has been so heavily tied into RDF, but I think there are some indications that this is changing. RDFa (or Attribute-centric RDF) provides a way of using a microformat like approach to add RDF triples and related items into both HTML and XHTML code, a significant step forward from the way that RDF is used now. There’s a growing movement afoot to use a more XQuery-like rather than SQL-like language for performing RDF SPARQL queries, and I’d not be at all surprised to see a formal sparql: namespace with an appropriate XQuery API published by the W3C within the next year or so.

Again, what this points to is that after more than a decade where each of the pieces of the W3C domain existed largely in independent silos, the realization has been made that in order for these technologies to succeed in the long run, they have to be integratible. Semantic web information is again simply data that needs to be queried as data, needs to be rpesented in a cohesive fashion, needs to be transported acrosss a suitable set of messaging protocols. In order for SemWeb information to become a part of the web, it needs to place nice with the rest of the web; there are signs that this is in fact happening, and this openness (and getting it out of the hands of academics and into the hands of workaday programmers) will go a long way in making the semantic web useful for the average web developer.

Companies/Projects to Watch: I’m going to pass in this space for the moment, as I haven’t seen any SemWeb companies yet that clearly differentiate themselves from the pack. However, I’m likely to come back to this list in my mid-year review.