Last time I say TimBL in person he looked a bit tired. Well, he has the right to be. The man has been fighting relentlessly for over two decades.
That was sometime in October last year, before Linked Data hit the knee of the curve.

It sure is exciting to watch his upbeat talk at Ted about Linked Data. The man knows the ship has already sailed, he projects the message. It might have to leave the bay yet, but things are auspicious and this is going to be a terrific journey.



Congratulations!
You pulled it off once again.

Transparency, here we go ;)

Links:

• http://linkeddata.org/
  
• Introducing the Planetary Datasphere (Part 1) - Orri Erling
  
• Linked Data is the Water in the SemWeb Pool
  

This is in reply to the following discussion .
I put it here because there is no guarantee of it emerging in web3beat (so, I am not only being called names, I also risk being moderated now ;).

It is slightly edited, but still addressed to one person in particular. However, I hope it will save others some time, in particular those feeling lost in the Web3 VS SemWeb VS SemTech VS Linked Data naming problem. Especially business folks who are starting to run into this communicational mess.

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The reason it is worth spending time here is because this is not a simple topic and is probably more important than the tech aspects involved. The "definitional confusion" is in fact what has kept the SW from coming to life.

From a social POV a Web of Data would be a gift. Just one URI gives you access to all the data relative to a certain event, person or project. Companies would benefit too of course, and new industries will appear, but just think of those "below the waterlevel" cases where people live and die out of a paper or a fact receiving proper attention.
Integration projects are expensive. But, what if you get rid of integration costs?
What if you outsource analysis? (part of the ecosystem that is already starting to align).
( add other ideas here... )

It is quite fascinating to see how such amount of value has remained stuck by protocolar aspects. RDF has been around since (1997?), Ontologies even before that. Text analysis is not new either. Agents are also old in the sense that not much advance has been made lately. They all hit walls at some point and have been evolving in a continuous manner (as opposed to radical).

Moving these techs yet one meter more will not trigger a paradigm shift. So that's not the front where we need to focus now. Which one is it?
There has been something else missing here.

With a calm mind, please take a look at what the Linked Data community has built in a year and the rate of growth it is attaining.
The only reason this "explosion" is happening now is because a group of people were bright enough to realize that they needed to split the vision. I agree this is just data and technology today, but expect to see an ecosystem of products and services very soon.
Why am I so certain about the latter? because there is value here. It simply provides better, faster solutions to many problems that exist today.

( And the answer to the existence of a semweb app is: Hardly, since we're just witnessing the birth of the web. I expect some of them will start hooking *into* the SemWeb during 2009. Just like you may choose to connect to the web today )

( I explained the difference between semweb and semtech on my blog ).

Now, on why this debate reached such heights. I spent time here, and I guess others did as well, because what might be "just an assertion" to you is in fact potentially problematic.
This web property is called Web3beat. Dan organizes events. You (Greg) most certainly have access to business users, decision makers and probably even people from Forrester and such.

To align with you in simple terms.
Linked Data is a simplification of the overall vision and a "marketing" trick if you wish to make people focus on what has to be done *now* w/o the overhead of having them buy/understand the intricacies of the next steps. Ontology alignment, structured data publishing, text mining and, eventually, privacy debates will all be (inevitable) consequences of the first step.

And have no sense withuout it.

The pool needs to be filled with water. We can then deploy the nice tricks.

This assertion has technical proof, and I can understand that it is not so obvious from a non-tech savvy level.
Even within the community there is confusion, since most people from inside see the project as one whole block.
Remember that this has taken a long, long time.

Again. Take a look at the LOD cloud and fantasize about what services will grow obsolete (an indicator of disruptive tech) and try to attain how much value is building up in there. Why didn't this happen before?

That's the point. That's what we've been consistently arguing.
Linked Data is the Water in the Pool ;)

We need this seed to showcase the USPs of the Web of Data, drive demand and make the industry advance.

Regards,
A

I know things are not so obvious on this front, so I can spare most people from not getting it. But when someone calls himself an expert consultant and starts discrediting Linked Data, all I can say is: geez... is it that bad?

It is all going to become pretty obvious rather soon. But for now, let me give you some hints.

Understanding what's really going on with this Web3.0 thing is not about being smarter or belonging to a given elite. The truth about the architectural future of the web is simple, but the story has been stretched through time and we don't see the direction of the plot, just like we don't perceive the sun's movement across the sky.

But the sun is moving.

( yeah, I know... but let's just say it is ;)

In the case of the Web's architecture, the trajectory follows a long term roadmap and, at this point, we are about to take one major step forward: moving from a Document Web to a Data Web.

The specifics of how this happens are actually quite simple. Just Google for "Linked Data".

( TIP: That's why RDF uses URIs everywhere. It is not to make our lifes harder... but so "data" can be accessed and linked to the Web. Pretty much like we access Web Pages today )

So, is it just data? No black magic? Records/Entities with URIs as Identifiers?
But, what's with this "Semantic" Thingy?
I thought this was much more complex: Ontologies, NLP, Rules, etc...

Ahh. Good question!

The short version of the answer is:

That's what happens when you put a lot of smart people together and things take longer than expected. They need to put their large brains to work on something. Luckily, they worked on the same project and took the second, third and probably fourth steps.
They could do this because, even if the first step ( Data Web ) was not ready, they could still use "mini Data Webs" ( any application is a mini Data Web. or Data Intranet if you wish ).
The fact that we have gained experience on the next steps is good because now that we are actually taking the first ones we have a much better idea on how to proceed and there are tons of tools anxiously waiting to get their teeth into a bigger pray.

But, if this is just happening, then why are there "Semantic Web" companies out there?
Oh, well. I can't be authoritative here as this is not my trademark and they sure have good intentions. But this is more or less what happened:

The second, third and fourth steps are generally about applying old (but powerful) ideas to large sets of data: reasoning, integration, extraction and analysis, etc. These techs are not conceptually new but, given their tight relation with the Semantic Web project, they have come to be known in some circles as Semantic Web technologies. In fact, most of them have been influenced by SW standards and the overall vision ( we are talking about a whole decade here! ).

But this is just "Semantic Tech", as there is not Web component yet (except for a few companies that are appearing as of 2008/2009).

So, I say it once again: Semantic Tech is just a part of the Semantic Web. Steps two, three, etc. The other part is, of course, the "Web" over which the techs will be applied.

Companies that use these"Semantic Techs" might or might not be aligned with the first step.

In fact, there are many companies that also use "Semantic Techs" but don't even know about this new collective name. Remember that these techs are not new. In fact, you can trace many of them back to ancient times!

And by ancient I mean ancient in internet time ( 20/30 years ) and in human time as well ( Greeks et Al. ).

Now, this might seem easy to understand yet there is a lot of controversy surrounding the definitions. Just think about the WWW for a while ( the Document Web as we know it ).
If you have a bunch of HTML files stored in your PC and they have no links going outwards and are not published on the Web ( not accessible via a URL, with or w/o security )... are these files ON the web?

Or if you put them on a Zip file and carry them around in a USB stick?

They would be just documents. Disconnected documents. The fact that they are using HTML is just an anecdote, as they are not really taking benefit of the core value proposition behind HTML: Links.

Stay tuned ;)