I attended an excellent panel discussion last week, featuring clever people who said insightful things about the Semantic Web. Nova Spivack of Radar Networks was a panelist and is an ardent proponent of the Semantic Web. This presentation lays out his worldview pretty well.
I’ve been asked whether MashLogic is a “Semantic Web company”, and my response varies based on who’s asking. I’ll clarify that here.
The Semantic Web is an enabling technology that improves the matching of intent between Consumers and Providers. That makes it something like DNS – end-users are generally unaware of its existence. Hence, I would be hesitant to pitch MashLogic as a Semantic Web company to users and publishers – have you heard of any DNS companies? So here’s what I tell them… “MashLogic is building a service that dynamically enriches web content to adapt to your preferences. We do this by using semantic intelligence (and when available, semantic markup) to uncover relationships between objects on a web page (e.g. names of people) and resources that service those objects (e.g. LinkedIn)“. Not as snappy as I’d like, but it’s the thought that counts.
Now we do use some traditional techniques (e.g. Classification, Extraction, Machine Learning, etc.) to accomplish our semantic goals. To investors and employees, I pitch MashLogic as a company that will help realize the promise of the Semantic Web. Not quite a Semantic Web company, but close enough.
Are we a Web 2.0 company? I don’t mind saying that we are, since we let users “mash up” data from sources of their choosing, we leverage and offer REST APIs, and our UI has the obligatory AJAX calls, progress meters and rounded corners. Detractors will accurately point out that our company name is not vowel-deprived.
Web 3.0? Wikipedia notes “More often (the term Web 3.0) is used as a marketing ploy to hype incremental improvements“. Count me in!
Social Graph? So I’ve been hearing about the Social Graph, which appears to describe a person-centric view of the web, including the social networks they inhabit, their online activities, their blogs and bookmarks, etc. Nova Spivack defines a Semantic Social Graph as a standardized (RDF, OWL) representation of a “regular” Social Graph. I have no idea how MashLogic plays into this, so we’ll just watch from the sidelines for now.
Giant Global Graph? What’s this? Tim Berners-Lee just wrote about GGG, and best I can tell, this is a generalizaton that does away with the person-centricity of the Social Graph and the document-centricity of the WWW. He says “It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important“. Interestingly, we do care quite deeply about Things (capital T) at MashLogic. We look at web pages as implicit representations of Things and their Attributes. Our mashups are simply a way to put Things on Top of Other Things. The GGG is closer to our heart than Social Graphs.
