I attended The Semantic Conference this week in San Jose. One of the most interesting talks was given by Mills Davis, who is a recognized expert in this area. Mills spoke about his Semantic Wave project and research. One part of the research hypothesizes an adoption cycle for different phases of the web. In other words, different paradigms for the organization and use of web content. They shift over time as the industry and technology matures. I will post this slide of his presentation soon.

The framework looks at two dimensions for the advancement of the web. First, there is the strength of the semantics. That refers to the degree of knowledge representation in the way information is defined for computers. You can have weak or strong semantics surrounding the same given piece of data (say, my contact information). The other dimension is the degree of reasoning capability of tools and applications. This is a smart way of framing the opportunity because it highlights essential trade-offs.

As you might expect, the industry is very early in its development. Since we live in an era of weak semantics the reasoning capability of applications/tools is limited to what he calls “recovery” which sounds like basic information retrieval. Folksonomy, the slew of techniques involving user-categorization, pushes the ball forward a little. We’re talking Web 2.0 here. It’s interesting to note that folksonomy is suggested to be mostly a different way of getting at the information recovery/retrieval problem. I buy that point-of-view. At the same time, “discovery”, the imminent phase, is something that sits beyond the reach of folksonomy by itself. Here I second the notion that folksonomy is a building block into the next phase of the web but not the core of it.

The stages beyond this, which constitute a vast majority of the framework, are not particularly relevant to an entrepreneur building a company to serve emerging user needs. Nonetheless, they are very revealing as an indicator of how far we have to go. The end state of this really long-term roadmap is a stage called Axiology. That’s a new term for my vocabulary. Mills explains that it’s a world where machine make value or ethical judgments.

Bubbling back up a level, it’s a very good call for the conference organizers to name this a “Semantic Technology” event as opposed to one about the so-called “Semantic Web.” I’m particularly unenthusiastic about the latter terminology. In case you hadn’t noticed, the current phase of the web is ruled by users not semantics and the social aspect are not going away ever. I prefer to think about semantic techniques as an important part of the web technology stack just like other approaches to generate, organize and represent content. For any application, especially one which is consumer-facing, the focus is primarily on what the app does as opposed to how. Google is the search engine that finds the most relevant information. Facebook is where all my friends hang out online. Digg is the best way to know what’s popular. Point being, the next phase of the web will be characterized by the types of experiences that are enabled for consumers/businesses, as opposed to the plumbing that powers it all. That said, the footprint of semantic technology within architectures is only growing.

A small example is Operator. Someone at the conference pointed out this interesting Firefox extension that works off microformats.

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Tags: Semantic Technology, Web 2 0, Folksonomy, Mills Davis, Microformats,