(semantic web) - semantics = linked data? - bobdc.blog

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(semantic web) - semantics = linked data?

7 October 2008

So much of the best "semantic web" technology has little to do with semantics.

When people talk about semantic technology, they're often talking about technology that has nothing to do with semantics. They're talking about the new possibilities that the RDF data model and the SPARQL query language add to distributed database applications, and there's a lot to talk about. As Jim Hendler once wrote

My document can point at your document on the Web, but my database can't point at something in your database without writing special purpose code. The Semantic Web aims at fixing that.

Why do we describe technology for easier integration of machine-readable data on the web as "semantic"? I don't mean to pick on Jim—I had the quote handy because it's in my file of favorite quotes, and few understand the semantic add-ons to Linked Data that will make for a proper Semantic Web better than he does—but I don't see semantics necessarily playing much role in the technology evolving to let web databases easily point at each other. There are some semantics built into the middle third of all RDF triples, because the requirement that a predicate use a full URL means that I can't just say "title" there, leaving you to wonder whether I'm talking about a job title, the deed to a piece of property, or the title of a work; I have to say something like http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title to make it clear that I mean the title of a work. In other words, I must make the semantics of the triple's predicate clear.

There is plenty of payoff when applications can combine data from different sources to do things with no need for a central schema tying them together, and this is possible ...

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