I admit it… I thought I got the semantic Web before, but I didn’t really. I really got it just recently.
People have noticed that I haven’t blogged much (well, really not at all) for the past week. That’s partly because I’ve been under some pretty tight deadlines at work lately, but also because I’ve also been feverishly working to fully grasp the semantic Web—not an easy task, for me at least.
Now that I’ve emerged on the other side of that process, the semantic Web seems like a pretty uncomplicated concept. But boy, let me tell you, trying to wrap my brain around it was quite a challenge. I always knew what it was about from a high level—RDF, triples, vocabularies and all of that. I could just never mentally translate those ideas into solutions for the problems I was working on. And it’s interesting, because I can plainly see the vision now and, more importantly, how it fits into real-world problems. I also see why it has been utterly failing at gaining any kind of traction outside of academia.
My little self-education process started when Kingsley Idehen invited me to a semantic Web get-together at MIT. We had emailed each other a few times before as a result of him finding my blog, and some posts I wrote about a year back about what is now being called data portability and distributed social networks. Since I’m now living in the Boston area, he invited me to MIT to meet in person and to get a sense of what the semantic Web ideas are truly about. The meeting was interesting, but I still came away unimpressed.
I kept in contact with Kingsley, peppering him with rapid-fire questions about semantic Web technology, technical details, and how it applies to my real-world problems, and he patiently answered all of my 
questions. Thanks for the tutoring there man, appreciate it 
I thought I was pretty forward-thinking for writing about things like data portability and distributed social networks a year or two before they became hot stuff, but I now have to tip my hat to Kingsley and a few select members of the Semantic Web crowd and admit that they had this problem figured out back when I was still in college.
Now that I understand it, I realize that the semantic Web is some very, very cool stuff. It includes many of the ideas that I’ve been writing about for a long time without fully realizing that they were encapsulated by semantic Web ideas. Many of the things that I’ve been wanting to do for a while—data portability, being able to use objects distributed across the Web, global object identifiers, distributing software across networks, and using converged online identities—are achievable by the semantic Web, and pretty much all of the details have already been worked out. It was an epiphany for me when I realized this, and I have to say I’m extremely happy about it because I had been thinking that all of this was a new trail that had to be blazed. Turns out, all the heavy lifting has already been done, it’s just never really been used much.
I think the biggest problem the semantic Web is facing is the fact that most of the people who understand it come primarily from academia. Academia, to me, is plagued with a disease that I myself have suffered from my entire life—that is, the urge to build something just because it’s cool technologically, not because it’s useful in the real world. While something I built might impress the hell out of other computer geeks, and I’d be extremely proud of it, other people would look at it with mild interest and then quickly move on to something else, because they couldn’t see the value in it. I’d have to say that I owe a lot to the experience of building Latigent and to my former business partner Chris Crosby for helping me overcome that handicap. Having to build something with resale value in order to pay the bills this month has a way of grounding you in reality. Having somebody else depending on you to build something of resale value, and remind you of that constantly, helps even more 
I’d highly recommend every geek who thinks he’s hot stuff work closely with a sales-oriented person for a period of time if you really have a desire to make any money.
Besides suffering from being sold by people who don’t really understand the real-world problems that it could fix, the semantic Web is plagued by a layer of jargon and terms that takes a significant investment of time to work through. While I understand that it’s important to clearly define what you’re talking about, people who are pushing the semantic Web are generally not very good at dumbing it down enough so that it’s easily palatable. It took me a good week of pretty focused research and having somebody there to bounce questions off of before I really got it–and I like to think that I’m a pretty technical guy. Now that I get it, I’m sure that there’s a better way to package these concepts so that more people understand how they relate to the problems they’re facing. The straightforward concepts that underlie the idea of the semantic Web are so obfuscated by the terminology and the W3C standards that come up when you google them that the mental barrier to entry is just way too high right now. The fact is, people will not adopt semantic Web ideas until semantic Web ideas are the ones that get returned when they search for a solution to their problem. In order to get to that point a radical change in the way these concepts are sold is needed. That, and people like Kingsley, Danny Ayers, Tim Berners-Lee and others who are out there tirelessly promoting it as a real-world solution to real-world problems.
Kingsley has started calling the semantic Web the Linked Data Web, which is definitely a good step towards packing the idea in a more attractive way. I would personally prefer something more closely related to living, breathing objects (not literally, but in the sense that they can actually do things besides just being queried for data). I think that the semantic Web crowd is a little too focused on the data output side of things—all of the excitement seems to be around querying data, finding data, building a better Google, etc. That’s cool and all, but it seems to me that the real killer application for these ideas is allowing nodes on the Internet to find and then actually communicate with each other. That key point almost seems lost in the shuffle to me. What is called the semantic Web today, with a nice healthy injection of service-oriented architecture, is going to be a revolution in computing. That’s the bit that excites me—enabling an Internet where any node can communicate and interact with any other node on the network.
I’m looking forward to continuing to learn more about the details that have been painstakingly worked out over the years on the semantic Web, and at some point actually getting an opportunity to put them into practice. I now have no doubt that the next earth-shattering applications, the revolutions in the way we use computers and the Internet, are going to spring from this movement, and I’m pretty excited about that. All it needs is a little sex appeal and it’ll catch on like wildfire.
