Following a post in which I had commented on Google’s and VortexDNA’s approaches to Web 3.0, a reader wrote in asking what other solutions are out there.

Fortunately, ZDNet’s David Berlind interviewed Sir Tim Berners-Lee last Wednesday at the MITX (Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange) Technology Awards, and then obligingly posted the video on his blog. Berners-Lee gives a convincing and relatively plain English (he does use the term ‘data bus’) explanation of the Semantic Web that’s been his pet project—I found it worth the 11 minutes I spent watching it.

One of the many things he touched base on was the difference between the Semantic Web and mash-ups of APIs. Basically, he explained, with mash-ups, people have to intentionally take two different databases and decide to put them together. An example might be someone taking a database of maps and a database of coffeehouses and slapping one on the other so you get maps of coffeehouses.

By contrast, Berners-Lee’s vision of the Semantic Web is that all of the information is just data, accessed by the universal query language SparQL. Once the work has been done to convert documents to standardized data, anyone can pull up anything or combine it in any fashion to see relationships.

In his writeup of the interview, though, Berlind raised some doubts as to whether it would be to the benefit of webcos to be on board with the data standards being proposed by Berners-Lee.

Given the popularity of API-driven access, in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help wonder if there wasn’t a bit of a race going on. On one side, there’s the W3C with the work its doing on the Semantic Web (based very much on something known as RDF or the Resource Description Framework).

On the other, a lot of big Internet companies would probably prefer developers go the non-standard API route because of the way API-dependencies can result in developer loyalty (ok, “lock-in”). After all, once code is written and reliant on APIs (and it works), API extrication (in favor of using SparQL against RDF) will invariably entail a rewrite. That is unless developers are anticipating the Semantic Web and modularizing their code in such a way that they have query modules that abstract query specifics. In that case, so long as the module returns the same information, it’s only the guts of the module that have to be fixed (trust me, it’s much more complicated that I’m making it seem).

Berlind isn’t the first to raise these questions—they cut to the heart of the Semantic Web vs. Semantic Search debate. It reminds me of the early days of Mac against PC. Yes, in that case the clear winning strategy was to open the standards to everyone, but in that case the standards hadn’t been defined or entrenched. To achieve Berners-Lee’s proposition, billions of web contributors would have to shift the way they operate. It will take a powerful tipping point to get there.

Do you think it will be possible to establish universal standards, like RDF, to make web data infinitely accessible? Or is the smarter bet on semantic tools to process non-semantic data?

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 11:46 am and is filed under Semantic Web, Web 3.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.