An Evolution With Teeth

Radar Networks, the stealth-mode semantic web start-up, is working on what CEO and founder Nova Spivack calls a consumer-facing service that will help people manage and share their knowledge on the web in some new ways.

Aimed at making the strength of the semantic web really useful to regular mortals, as Spivack puts it, the company will be talking more about its technology, which will include capabilities such as semantic search, this fall, and rolling it out in stages.

The semantic web is rolling out in stages, as well.

“I think that the semantic web is an evolution more than a revolution,” says Spivack, who co-founded EarthWeb in the '90s. It is, he thinks, an upgrade of the capabilities of the existing web rather than a replacement. “At first it won’t be as radical a change as some people have hyped it. It will be an iterative, incremental, gradual improvement of all the information tools we use, and that will over time reach a tipping point. But that’s more than ten years away.”

But some people’s evolution might be others’ revolution, he acknowledges.

“Maybe making things 20% more productive is kind of revolutionary, but to me revolutionary is someone discovers how to do teleporting,” he says. “I don’t think it’s like that.”

Providing Structure to Data

That’s not to say Spivack doesn’t have enormous belief in its significance. The semantic data web is based on open standards run by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) that include RDF (the Resource Description Framework for providing metadata about Internet resources), the SPARQL query language, and the web ontology language OWL, a semantic markup language for publishing and sharing ontologies on the World Wide Web.

Beyond plain old semantics, the semantic data web lets you provide structure to data, turn unstructured data into structured data, and turn structured data into more interoperable structured data. And that is the foundation for turning the web into something more like a database understandable by any machine that understands RDF and OWL and is compliant with those standards.

“The one thing I think will happen is you will start to see structured data made accessible through APIs. It is today, but you must know the schema in advance,” he says. Not so with the semantic web. SPARQL lets you send a query in RDF format into any service that has a SPARQL API access point on it, and get an answer back in RDF. Imagine people taking a database — even if that doesn’t exist in RDF, you can put a SPARQL access point to it — and create a query that makes it easier to mix and reuse data, he says, making database mash-ups easier to accomplish.

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