"Semantic" Web = Linked Open Data Web

One of the most unfortunate things to happen to the Semantic Web movement is its name.  The word "semantic" always, ALWAYS, gets people thinking of semantic text analysis--that is, analyzing a chunk of text and figuring out what it's about.  That's what Google is for, that is NOT what the Semantic Web is for.

Tim Berners-Lee does a good job of pointing this out in a recent post where he discusses the killer application for the Semantic Web:

Text search engines are of course good for searching the text in documents, but the Semantic Web isn't text documents, it is data. It isn't obvious what the killer apps will be - there are many contenders

What's really annoying is that even when I go to Semantic Web meetups at MIT, people there for some reason are stuck on building a better Google.  You hear it all the time, and it's just really off base.  Tim feels the same way:

One thing to always remember is that the Web of the future will have BOTH documents and data. The Semantic Web will not supersede the current Web. They will coexist. The techniques for searching and surfing the different aspects will be different but will connect. Text search engines don't have to go out of fashion.

I've been saying this for a while:  Why in the world would you try to build a better Google?  It already does an OUTSTANDING job of doing what it does--searching text.  No thanks, I will keep my Google, what we REALLY need to address is identifying objects properly on the Web--linking data.

Kingsley and some other people have been pushing the Linked Open Data brand instead of Semantic Web lately, and I will agree that it fits much better.  The word "semantic" just throws many people way off course, and I think it actually creates disinterest in a lot of people who would otherwise dive in and start using it.  "Linked Open Data" MUCH more accurately describes what it's about.

Linking data is about exposing data so that it can be re-used in other ways that you hadn't thought of yet and queried using SPARQL.  Its analogous to Service Oriented Architecture in that it exposes part of your application to be re-used and mashed-up across the entire Internet--except that it's exposing the data, not the functionality.  (But wow, put the two together and you REALLY have something cool!)

By the way, here's the money shot from Tim if you're looking to make money from the Linked Open Data/Semantic Web, print this one out and pin it to your wall:

So if you are a VC funder or a journalist and some project is being sold to you as a Semantic Web project, ask how it gets extra re-use of data, by people who would not normally have access to it, or in ways for which it was not originally designed. Does it use standards? Is it available in RDF? Is there a SPARQL server?