"Towards a personal, decentralised web"
28.10.2008
INTERVIEW: Matthias Samwald and Thomas Schandl talk about their vision and contributions towards a future on the Semantic Web. With backgrounds in neuroscience and business informatics respectively, they both joined the Semantic Web Company in 2008 as consultants, semantic web developers and experts. The interview was led by Marion Fugl�wicz-Bren.
What are your personal tasks and priorities within the Semantic Web Company (SWC)?
Thomas Schandl: I have recently joined SWC and I started to work on expanding our business solutions portfolio with several open source applications. I will also look at our existing solutions in order to implement them at our customers' sites and to adapt them to their needs.
Matthias Samwald: I have several roles, the main one being an expert in advanced Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies. I am active in the "KiWi - Knowledge in a Wiki" EU project, which is centered around building a semantic wiki system for corporate knowledge management. I am also consulting some of our customers.
What is the position of SWC within the world of the web?
Thomas Schandl: The Semantic Web Company is Austria's vanguard for business solutions using Semantic Web technologies. As Semantic Web applications are starting to show visible benefits and are becoming more easily usable for the average user, the SWC will be among the first companies to put these technologies to commercial use.
Matthias Samwald: Yes, I also think that the SWC positioned itself in an area of expertise where widespread application is growing considerably over the next few years. Being part of innovative and new technologies might require large investments upfront, but it leads to a very good market position later on. The SWC will profit from this development.
In what way will you influence the Semantic Web Company?
Thomas Schandl: I will try to put my knowledge about business administration and information technologies to good use, for example by acting as a liason between business and technology people. I think it is crucial to be able to communicate the advantage and usage of the semantic technologies in a generally understable way to the non-IT experts among our customers.
What is your personal attitude towards the Semantic Web? How will semantic technologies influence the way we communicate and work?
Thomas Schandl: I feel the Semantic Web is the next logical step in the evolution of the web, which is very exciting to work on. Currently a lot of data that is available on web pages is generated using contents of databases. These databases already have a useful semantic structure, that is lost when its data is published on the web only with HTML markup.
Public organisations with access to vast amounts of data like the BBC are starting to publish it in more machine friendly ways, enabling anyone to build applications that grab semantically marked up information from different websites and combine and process it in meaningful ways. I am convinced people will utilize these new possibilities in exciting new ways, ways we can only begin to imagine yet. It will influence with whom we communicate, just as it might aid us in discovering people with similar interests to ours or people that have the expertise that we need.
Matthias Samwald: Semantic Web technologies and ontologies allow us to describe things of interest in a more direct, natural way. At the moment, users have to deal with many layers of abstraction between what they actually want to communicate and how they need to represent it in computer systems. Current technology forces people to think in terms of web pages, database records, documents, et cetera. On the classic web, we are using URLs to address web pages, and on those web pages we might see data derived from databases -- containing statements such as "Vienna is the capital of Austria".
However, the statements themselves cannot be referenced or processed by machines. On the Semantic Web, we apply web addresses to each of the entities we are describing -- 'Vienna', 'is-capital-of', 'Austria' -- not just to the document. This makes it possible to reference the entities and facts inside a document, and to build applications that can work with those entities and facts.
How is the Semantic Web going to influence our everyday lives?
Thomas Schandl: There will be applications that take into account our interests and past behaviour on the web and which use it to accurately suggest to us items that are of great interest to us, be it web pages, music, books, people etc., which we didn't even know existed. This means the semantic web will greatly boost the "serendipity" effect: it will aid in seemingly accidential discovery of items of interest or help us uncover hidden connections between things we already know.
Matthias Samwald: I think part of the Semantic Web technologies are working in a relatively subtle way, being shielded away from the awareness of most web users. People will profit from the increase in efficiency in information-intensive industries such as as pharmaceutical development and health care. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that once someone implements a "killer app" based on Semantic Web technologies, the terms 'Semantic Web' and 'linked data' will become as common among web users as blogs and RSS feeds are today. I really think that this will happen in the next two to five years.
I also think that Semantic Web technologies will receive a lot of media attention when the first big, public breach in security / privacy happens in one of the websites that currently dominate the whole world wide web. At the moment, we all are uploading most of our private and business lives to web sites such as Google, Facebook, Flickr and others. It is just a matter of time until a big scandal happens, be it the companies themselves that misuse the vast amounts of data they have, or be it a government agency in an overzealous effort of crime prevention.
When this will happen, people will re-evaluate the trend towards massive centralisation on the web, and will search for opportunities to make the same feeling of being 'in the network' happen in a distributed environment, without selling ones soul to a multinational corporation. Then we will find that such an opportunity already exists -- the Semantic Web.
About Thomas Schandl
Thomas Schandl studied business administration at Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, where he was also employed at the Dept. for Advertising and Marketing Research. In the course of his studies, he specialised in Business Informatics, writing his diploma thesis on reputation systems on the Semantic Web. After completing is degree, he worked on the SIOC project at DERI Galway in Ireland. In August 2008, he joined the Semantic Web Company as semantic web developer and consultant, where his focus is on semantic technologies in the context of Social Software and Wikis and their implementation in businesses.
About Matthias Samwald
Matthias Samwald, Ph.D., is an expert for the application of Semantic Web technologies in life science, medicine and other knowledge-intensive domains. He studied neuroscience and bioinformatics at the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna, where he also completed his PhD in April 2008. He is a member of the W3C Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Science Interest Group. He has worked on several Semantic Web projects for the Yale Center for Medical Informatics (USA), Science Commons (USA) and DERI Galway (Ireland). In January 2008, Matthias Samwald joined the team of the Semantic Web Company.