I am breaking silence for a while after running into some discussions. This blog is kept simple on purpose. I am saving my energy for stuff that matters more to me ( I don't consider self promotion any priority and my social interactions happen through other media. Email mostly, now Twitter ).

Anyway, if you arrive asking yourself: "what does this guy have to do with SW?". The short answer is: I have been working with "Semantic" tech for more than 6 years. Initially due to curiosity, then because I fell in love with reasoners and KRFs as more flexible substrates for business applications. And lately because it is... finally... happening ;)

The Semantic Web is here. Or... is it the Linked Data web?

Well, here are some brief definitional clarifications.


The First Step came after the Second One:

We have always been capable of using NLP, metadata extraction heuristics or relational mappings to generate structured data from large a corpus of text, streams, etc.
We've also long had KRFs and reasoners to describe and derive new knowledge. 

The Unique and "Novel" Selling Point of the SW is the "Web" aspect of its architecture, because the other parts are not really any breakthrough ( in fact, they are better solved somewhere else. We are playing catch up here with specialized solutions ).

This is fundamentally why some argue that no real Semantic "Web" existed before 2008/9. Because there was no "Web", only silos. People using RDF as a KRF for old practices ( not saying they aren't useful. I was one of them ). 

Linked Data and URIs as pointers is what finally makes the Semantic Web a "Web". As I said, I don't think anyone argues the importance of the other elements in the long run. 
The nice twist here is that, rather soon, the large amount of Linked Data ( which many are calling, "layer 1" ) being generated will fuel a breakthrough in the other areas. 

For example: NLP engines will now have access to wordnet + cyc + dbpedia + a myriad vertical dbs. All interconnected. No one says Linked Data *is* the SW. In fact that's why it has a different name ;)

For us in the trenches, it is about making the "Web" aspect happen.