Fred On Something'sComments

Semantic markup and why we should care

Warning: I am about to discuss code. Your eyes may experience a slight “glazing over” sensation.

I’ve spent the last year or so devouring countless books, tutorials and articles pertaining to CSS, web standards and blog and CMS technology. In many ways it feels like I’ve had to unlearn everything I’ve been practicing for the last half dozen years or so and start from scratch. This transition was not an urgent necessity—I could have very well continued to build websites the way I always have and they would work just fine. For now.

But I know that the web will look and function very differently than it does today in a few years time, and I intend to be prepared. I am not only looking out for my own career, but for my clients’ investment in the web as well. They may not want to know about web standards now, but soon they will (or at the least, it will surely affect them), and I need to be an expert when that time comes.

One of the main things that the semantic web changes is the search capability. Search will, theoretically, be much more effective than current keyword search. You will be able to enter search string like “I am searching for a used car in Montreal for less than 3000 dollars”. Then the search engines will analyze, semantically, this string and find the best entries.

What to tell to your clients? Simple: if your employees are spending 45 minutes by days to search things, they will now spend only 15 minutes to search what they really want. He will save approximately 75 hours/year/employee or around 2250$ if he have a salary of 30$/hour. Only for each employee… I think it could worth it

However, if you want a good introduction book about the Semantic Web, there it is:

A semantic web primer

Semantic web as future reality

In reply to Vidar:

Thanks for taking the time to comment. I agree with you that the code is complex too. I think the main thing is that if the code/markup is simple, then it doesn’t matter as much if the specification is hard to read and the other way around… The problem with things like RDF and OWL for instance is that both are hard.

I’m hoping to spend some time trying to understand the technologies and writing some tools, but I know my time is way too limited to make a major impact. I’ve gotten part way through an N3 parser, though, and that’s helping me understand a lot of the technologies.

[…]

Yeah, I have a formation as a computer scientist and math formulas are essential to get rid of ambiguities (it’s, for example, one of the goals of formal specification of softwares).

But the current problem is that the technology we are discussing about is intended to be used by anybody, computer scientists or not. It’s why we will need to write both scientific and vulgarized articles. The first to erase ambiguities and to have formal foundations; the second to be understood and implemented in softwares of any kind.

Semantic web as future reality

This entry at Fred on Something neatly summarises my painful experiences while reading the W3 specs and assorted tutorial this weekend:

The thing is that RDF is not intended to be easily understood by humans like simple XML documents. RDF is intended to be understood by machines.
However, I still think the lack of accessibility of the W3 specs is a big problem. The XML spec is reasonably accessible. Even the XML Schema spec is. I can sit down with them, read them, and start writing a parser. Granted, it wouldn’t be a very good parser if I didn’t know more than I’d learned from a single reading of the specs, but I’d be able to.

It’s less important that the formats are inaccessible if the specs are easily accessible so we get good tools to deal with them.
[…]

You are completely right. It’s sure that if the base specification’s document is not readable and understandable, we are in troubles. Personally i was talking about the resulting code, but the problem you rise is much more important. Every future softwares will be based on these documents.

The problem of documentation is deep in computer sciences. It’s why there are vulgarization contest in universities. Another problem is that many people think that putting useless mathematical formulas or incomprehensible words is essential to have credibility. In the present case, it is not. You are right: these technologies need to be understand by the average computer scientist or hobbyist. It’s essential to spread the good news and encourage them to develop software that use it.

I hope that people will write code example and clarified documents about these new technologies. Personally I would have some problems to do it considering my current English writing but I’m sure some will.