Matthias Samwald: "We need to achieve some basic ethics of creating Semantic Web content… Life science communities might be able to pave the way…"
11.01.2008
On the occasion of Matthias Samwald´s new engagement for the Semantic Web Company Marion Fugléwicz-Bren (SWC) talked with the biomedical research expert about some important key aspects. The easiest way to create revenue from Semantic Web technologies could lie in creating in-house solutions for corporate intranets. Also the potential for targeted advertising is huge.
You said that the community should become less reluctant to apply Semantic Web technologies in radically new ways. Why and in which ways? How would you describe the benefits of Semantic Web technologies?
I think we should aim to apply Semantic Web technologies in fundamentally novel ways, instead of just adding a thin layer of ‘semantic sugar’ on top of traditional software systems. Without a doubt, such ‘semantic sugar’ can make many traditional applications much more tasty and efficient – but the potential of Semantic Web technologies is much greater than that. This potential can be realized when we use these technologies as the foundations of our systems.
For example, instead of describing digital resources which themselves describe entities of interest such as database records, wiki pages and files, we should focus on describing those entities of interest directly -- without taking a detour through describing database entries and other artifacts of the pre-Semantic Web era. We can use the identifier tag:example.org:Eiffel_Tower to refer to the one, single Eiffel Tower itself, not to some abstract conception, description or database entry about it. The Semantic Web technologies allow us to directly map the structure of reality itself. I have coined the term Reality-Oriented Web to describe this approach.
This seems like a very fine, almost purely philosophical distinction, but it has major practical implications. It greatly simplifies how we can describe the things we are interested in, and it makes it much easier to achieve a shared, coherent Semantic Web – instead of a web where each person is lost in his or her own, private ‘tag-cloud’.
RDF/OWL is not only a syntactically more flexible alternative to current database systems; it enables a whole new philosophy of how information can be organized. If we want to demonstrate all of the advantages of the Semantic Web, we need to be bold enough to break with current patterns of thinking.
So you think we are currently not working on a unified, coherent Semantic Web?
We are not doing as well as we could do. We are currently steering towards a Semantic Web with a high degree of redundancy in terms of identifiers / URIs. URIs for things that are essentially the same are being generated with a breathtaking pace, and a mapping between these entities is often not technically feasible.
This problem has two causes:
- technically, it is often quite hard to find existing resources. This needs to be addressed by the creation of services that allow for the quick retrieval of existing resources during ontology creation. This is the goal of several projects under development at the Semantic Web Company, and is also addressed in other projects such as Sindice.com developed at DERI Galway. A person creating content on the Semantic Web must feel the mass of existing resources under his or her fingertips, and be able to make use of existing resources where they fit. This saves the user a lot of work and makes the resulting Semantic Web structure much more coherent and useful. Unfortunately, many current Semantic Web applications do not provide such features.
- socially, many people are very reluctant to re-use entities that they have not created themselves; that have a URI with a foreign namespace. This problem is still underestimated and has already done a lot of damage to the development of the Semantic Web. We need to achieve some basic ethics of creating Semantic Web content, and trying to make use of existing resources where possible should be one of the most important ethical rules to follow.
You have a background in biomedical research. In what way can the life sciences and the health care sector profit from Semantic Web technologies? Why especially these branches?
The life sciences and the health care sector are in dire need for some technology that helps to integrate the information across the vast number of different knowledge domains, organization domains, scales, disciplines and communities. The current information infrastructure is holding back progress in these important areas; potential cures for diseases such as Alzheimer’s or cancer are delayed because of the inefficiencies of this system. The Semantic Web is by far the most promising candidate for providing a sustainable solution to these problems.
I think that the life science and health care communities will become the leading areas of development on the Semantic Web during the next years, and will pave the way for making these technologies useful for other areas that are still more reluctant towards their adaptation.
Which strategies could help in making Semantic Web development a commercially viable option for software companies?
Semantic Web technologies can be used both on the public internet as well as the intranet of organizations (e.g., pharmaceutical industry, healthcare providers). The easiest way to create revenue from Semantic Web technologies at the moment probably lies in creating in-house solutions for such corporate intranets. However, I am also interested in the possibility of making the public, global Semantic Web commercially useful. We should think about scenarios where the value of the Semantic Web for commercial enterprises is not solely based on using the technologies locally, but also on becoming part of the global HCLS Semantic Web community; donating Semantic Web resources where possible and, at the same time, profiting from the donations of others. Creating an open information and knowledge economy, that can be seamlessly integrated with closed, proprietary in-house solution. The role of a Semantic Web company in such a scenario would not only be to tailor software applications to the specific needs of customers. Its role would also be to help customers orient in the sometimes puzzling world of the emerging Semantic Web and to become 'good citizens' of this world, making their information resources play along nicely with the information resources of others – for the mutual benefit of all involved parties.
An important open question is the role of advertisements on the Semantic Web. Revenue from targeted advertisements on websites is financing large portions of the current public web. Non-governmental institutions that plan to freely offer information resource on the Semantic Web need to be able to get some revenue from placing advertisements. In some cases, e.g., when the information is not offered through some HTML page but through a SPARQL query endpoint, it is currently difficult to place targeted advertisements. It is important for the sustained growth of the public Semantic Web to explore strategies for placing advertisements in such scenarios. Because information and context is much more explicit in Semantic Web resources than on normal web pages, the potential for targeted advertising (similar to Google's AdSense) is huge.
About Matthias Samwald ...
Mag. Matthias Samwald (currently working on his thesis) has a background in neuroscience and the application of Semantic Web technologies for biomedical research and development. He is a member of the W3C Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Science Interest Group. He is working on Semantic Web projects for the Yale Center for Medical Informatics (USA), Science Commons (USA), DERI Galway (USA) and the Medical University of Vienna (Austria). Since January 2007 he is an employee of the Semantic Web Company (Austria).