Semantic Web: Customers and Suppliers

This talk has been given by Rudi Studer as a keynote at ISWC2006.

[edit] Abstract

The notion of the Semantic Web can be coined as a Web of data when bringing database content to the Web or as a Web of enriched human-readable content when encoding the semantics of web-resources in a machine-interpretable form.

It has been clear from the beginning that realizing the Semantic Web vision will require interdisciplinary research. At this the fifth ISWC, it is time to re-examine the extent to which interdisciplinary work has played and can play a role in Semantic Web research, and even how Semantic Web research can contribute to other disciplines. Core Semantic Web research has drawn from various disciplines, such as knowledge representation and formal ontologies, reusing and further developing their techniques in a new context.

However, there are several other disciplines that explore research issues very relevant to the Semantic Web in different guises and to differing extents. As a community, we can benefit by also recognizing and drawing from the research in these different disciplines. On the other hand, Semantic Web research also has much to contribute to these disciplines and communities. For example, the Semantic Web offers scenario that often ask for unprecedented scalability of techniques from other disciplines. Throughout the talk, I will illustrate these points through examples from disciplines such as natural language processing, databases, software engineering and automated reasoning.

The industry also has a major role to play in the realization of the Semantic Web vision. I will therefore additionally examine the added value of Semantic Web technologies for commercial applications and discuss issues that should be addressed for broadening the market for Semantic Web technologies.

[edit] Questions

The following questions have been aked after the talk at ISWC2006.

• "What are the connections between the mutlimedia community and the Semantic Web community? Would you agree that the relationships to multimedia are growing stringer these days?" (Jeff Z. Pan)
  • "Yes, I agree. The tradition in multimedia research often is more bottom-up analysis, based on single pixles, whereas semantic technologies supply concepts on a higher level. Integrating this is a challenge for he upcoming future."
• "The database people do not seem to use much semantic technologies today. What can be done to improve the interactions with this community?" (Stefan Decker)
  • "This is a typical problem of bridging gaps between communities and it requires a lot of effort to build those bridges. For instance, not many members of the semantic technologies community have submitted papers to database conference."
• "We have submitted papers to database conferences, but we found that you have to write papers differently to reach that community." (Amit Sheth)
• "What about the relationship to other applied science communities, such as medicine and biology?" (?)
  • Indeed there are other communities that would be good customers for semantic technologies. Not all could be mentioned within this talk.
• I am also interested in the relatioships to software engineeering. The community has made a number of paradigm changes in its history. Do you think that semantic web technologies could similarly become a part of future software engineering paradigms? (Tim Berners-Lee)
  • Indeed, I think that many relationships exist, e.g. there are many overlaps related to modelling. But many other issues in software engineering, such as service based architectures, are also possible fields for interaction between the communities.
• Would you agree that the technical interactions of communities are often more complex than simple customer/supplier relationships? (?)
  • Yes, the talk was intended to give a clear message, but of course reality is more complex than what a one-hour talk can convey.
• "Are there any people within the mainstream database community that consider the problem of building stores for semantic data, or is this just one by people in the semantic technology community?" (?)
  • I can not say much about the database community, but it seems that the level of awareness is currently too low for database people to really engage in these challenges.