AUG 2nd 2007

Jim Rapoza at eWeek has an opinion about gaming the Semantic Web regarding companies and developers that are using the Semantic Web label inappropriately. He makes a good point worth mentioning: When an innovative new idea comes along and gets popular enough it is commonplace to see vendors and companies take some of the concepts and strategies of the idea and try to adapt them, but are often not true to the idea's core principals (either purposely or accidentally).

In a recent interview between Jim and Tim Berners-Lee, Tim said for a product to really be a Semantic Web product, it must support key standards such as RDF. Berners-Lee is the inventor of the Semantic Web and both he and the W3C are in the best position to make the rules.

So what is being falsely labeled as Semantic Web? He never mentions any specific companies, people, or products. I'm actually going to go out on a limb here and name a service from ClearForest called Semantic Web Service. It's essentially a Web service for named entity extraction. SWS is a very neat service and I am a big fan of what they're doing with it (see Gnosis). I just don't consider "Semantic Web Service" to be an appropriate name, even though I consider natural language processing to be a topic related to the development of the Semantic Web.

Who is misrepresenting the Semantic Web?

About the author

James Simmons

It's my goal to help bring about the Semantic Web. I also like to explore related topics like natural language processing, information retrieval, and web evolution. I'm the primary author of Semantic Focus and I'm currently working on several Semantic Web projects.

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