An Evolution With Teeth

“For supply chain integration having the ability to use ontologies and semantic web data APIs could be useful. A company will put up a product catalog and Company B wants to pull that in because they are starting to use their parts, and they can use that data right away without doing a lot of work,” he says. “You don’t have to write a database schema.”

Professionals will also benefit from better tools for collaboration. A lot of collaborative applications are database-driven, but databases are too hard to make and too hard to administer, says Spivack. That changes with the semantic web, where it becomes easy to create new data types and extend them and build new databases, without being a database developer.

For individuals, the semantic web will enable a richer experience of the web, especially around search, because it will allow for greater precision; around social networking, where it can add richness to profiles of persons and their relationships; around user-generated content, where content tags will be connected to networks of context; and around making data more portable.

Today, your data is stuck in various applications, but as all these data formats get mappings to RDF you will start to be able to “rescue data from silos and reuse it in another place. So it will improve the free market for consumers of where they want to put their data,” he says. They can move email from one application into another or bookmarks from one browser to another, for example.

Ultimately, that could affect the fortunes of some big vendors.

“Some companies and organizations are about platform lock-in, and those companies will be late adopters and may miss the boat,” says Spivack, referencing as an example one nameless vendor with the stock symbol MSFT. “That business model may not survive,. The next big model may be openness and platform freedom. You own your data and we make it really easy to take it wherever you want and if you don’t want to leave it with us that’s fine.”