Comments for Semantic Web: What Is The Killer App?

Semantic Web: What Is The Killer App?

2008-01-10T06:22:00Z

The Semantic Web has been in the making for some time and people think it is nearing maturity. We have written about this trend extensively, with our two most notable posts being an analysis of the challenges of the classic bottom-up approach and the promise of the new top-down one. Regardless of how the Semantic Web will come about, for it to flourish it needs to hit the mainstream. There is no way that consumers will appreciate the elegance and mathematical soundness of RDF and OWL. People don't care about math, they care about utility and even more, about fun. What the Semantic Web needs, then, is a killer app.

]]> Whatever it is, it needs to layer an understanding of semantics on top of a consumer application. The consumer application needs to be so cool and so viral that people will be open to learning that it is powered by semantic technologies. In that case, it will be possible to further market applications as Semantic Web apps. Consumers will understand that if one Semantic Web application has potential, so might others. In math, this is called proof by induction. In marketing this is called creating a market. In any case, it needs to be done.

In this post, we analyze several existing and potential applications of semantic technologies and look for the killer app.

Natual Language Understanding

Since the beginning, the Semantic Web has been associated with Artificial Intelligence. The idea of representing information in structured form so that computers can "understand it" and then solve complex problems was one of the keystones of the Semantic Web vision. The problem is that representing billions of existing web documents as RDF is a rather daunting, if not impossible task. An alternative would be to "teach" computers natural language. If an application could read the page the way we read it and interpret what it says, the annotations would not be necessary.

Natural language processing has been the Holy Grail of AI for awhile now. However, it is a very difficult problem, because humans are born with the innate ability to understand language and we learn it not in a vacuum, but in the context of life. Certainly if we could replicate that with computers, it would be amazing and it would be the killer app. The problem is that this is not on the horizon. The Semantic Web technologies of today are not able to represent natural language in its entirety, and this is not really even their goal. Even if we could represent each page completely, there is still the matter of interpreting structure into semantics, which is the magic that our brain does so well and so easily.

Genie In The Bottle

Related to natural language understanding, is another idea that is not on the horizon. John Markoff called it "the perfect vacation." I call it the "Genie in the Bottle" to illustrate the impossibility of this. There is a misunderstanding about the Semantic Web which is floating around, which equates the Semantic Web with ability to solve really hard problems. It is simply not true.

For example, if you go to a new travel agency and ask them to book the perfect vacation for you, the travel agent will not be able to do it, because she does not know you. In order to find the perfect vacation there needs to be constraints: where you've been before, who you are going with, what you like to do, what is your budget, etc. Finding the "perfect" vacation is not a one shot deal, it is a process, which leverages iteration and memory.

True, with the Semantic Web the information is structured, but it does not mean that the computer can necessarily solve complex problems. These are two completely different things. Just because you have a map, does not mean that you know the best way to get from point A to point B. Having a map is necessary, but it is not sufficient, you need the algorithm to find the best path. There is a big difference between asking what is the capital of France and what is the cheapest airfair today to fly from New York to Paris. And the even harder question is: Where should I go on vacation next? Computers are not going to give us an instant, perfect answer to this question anytime soon, if ever. Again, this would be the killer app, it is just not likely to happen.

Semantic Knowledge Databases

So what is realistic and possible today? The first in the list of growing applications are Semantic Knowledge Databases. The two examples that we will look at here are Freebase and Twine. While Freebase is focusing on building essentially a semantic equivalent of Wikipedia, and Twine is focused on a personal semantic database, both are databases, both focus on knowledge management, and both are Wikipedia-like. The advantage of these databases over Wikipedia is that they represent information in a structured way and support queries. To understand the difference, take a look at the Alicia Keys page on Freebase and on Wikipedia. At first glance they are very similar, but Freebase "knows" that Alicia Keys is a blues singer and it then knows other blues singers. For Wikipedia, blues is just another page, not a music genre. So Freebase can potentially answer a question of listing all blues singers, while Wikipedia can not.

This is certainly interesting but the question is will people care? Can the end consumer tell the difference? Unlikely. Today Wikipedia contains definitive references on a vast number of topics. Like Google, it is easy to search and find relevant information, and as a result, people are not likely to be in need of a better Wikipedia. With Twine the situation might prove to be different, because personal knowledge management is an important problem. The first question is: Are their enough people who want to be efficient in managing personal knowledge? I think the answer is increasingly likely to be "yes." And the second question is: Does knowing the semantics of knowledge help you build the best application? At the very least Twine has to beat del.icio.us bookmarks and ideally needs to do for personal knowledge management what Highrise is doing for CRM.

But beyond the execution, there is still another problem. For a semantic knowledge base to be the killer app it needs to ignite imagination and capture people's hearts and minds. This is not likely to happen. We appreciate libraries, we can not live without them, but we take them for granted. Knowledge has been commoditized thanks to Google, Wikipedia, and the blogosphere, and is perceived as abundant and unexciting. For this reason Semantic Databases are not likely to be the killer apps -- but they might become a stepping stone towards one.

Semantic Search

An early candidate for the killer app in the semantic web category was search. First Hakia and more recently Powerset marketed the idea that a semantic search engine, one that is based on the understanding of natural language, can beat Google. On top of having the pressure to deliver qualitatively better results, Semantic Search companies also have to, at least approximately, solve the problem of natural language understanding, which as we discussed earlier is a very difficult one.

Where things stand right now, it does not look like search is the killer app for semantics. The understanding of natural language does not seem to give you a noticeable edge in getting better search results. At least in the comparisons that we have performed earlier there is no major difference. The statistical algorithm deployed by Google is precise and good enough, which is why it has been the clear leader in web search for the past 8 years. To unseat Google will require more than incremental improvement in search, it will likely take a paradigm shift and the creation of a different web experience. Below, we discuss how "discovery" could possibly take a bite out of the pie, but as of now Google's algorithm remains good and strong.

Social Graph

After Tim Bernes-Lee posted his thoughts on the Social Graph, a discussion began on the web in which people wondered if the Social Graph is in fact the Semantic Web. This, however, is a gross misinterpretation of the post. The Social Graph is not the Semantic Web, nor is it the killer app of the Semantic Web. They are just two separate concepts. The confusion comes from the fact that they both are Mathematical Graphs or a Network. The underlying structure of both consists of nodes connected by links. Many things in the nature and society are networks, so it is not surprising that meaning and people fall into this category.

If anything, it is more correct to say that the Social Graph is a subset of the giant, all encompasing Semantic Web. Knowing how people are connected is important in order to solve the perfect vacation problem. After all, a perfect vacation should be taken together with perfect friends, right? But jokes aside, the Social Graph is an interesting and important trend for 2008, however, it is not really related to Semantic Web.

Shortcuts

Increasingly, we are seeing a new breed of Semantic Applications, which we generalize as shortcuts. This category includes SnapShots from Snap, BlueOrganizer and SmartLinks from AdaptiveBlue, Shortcuts from Yahoo!, and In-text search from Lingospot. What is common between all these technologies is that they leverage the simple semantics of the content to deliver additional information. In the case of Snap and AdaptiveBlue, the semantics is defined by the URL, while Yahoo! and Lingospot perform text analysis.

Regardless of the method, all of these technologies deliver related information via Ajax popups. That is, they leverage semantics to pull the information from the web. This is essentially discovery or reverse search. When the user is looking at a book there is a preview with a brief description and the cover image, when the user encounters a stock symbol he is presented with a stock chart, analysis and additional links to the company, when the user is looking at a music album there is a play button, and when the user encounters a movie there is an ability to watch the trailer in place. The shortcuts remove the need to search, instead, the related content from the web comes right into the page.

Today's shortcut technologies are simple and still in their infancy, but they are among the most successful examples of semantic applications. However, we can not call them the killer app for several reasons.

First, people perceive them as advertising, which is not the point. Snap certainly made an early push into ads, but this is not a representation of what these technologies will look like in the future. Second, in their current implementation, all of these technologies are utilities. For the same reason that people are not going to get emotional about personal knowledge management, they will not be emotional about shortcuts. Shortcuts will also be taken for granted.

Yet, shortcuts hold the most promise. With a few more iterations these technologies are going to get slicker and more precise. They will leverage content and micro-context to reduce the amount of search. They will become more personalized based on user behavior. And once this happens it will be a big deal.

Full Disclosure: Alex Iskold is the founder and CEO of AdaptiveBlue.

Conclusion

We are still waiting for the killer app for Semantic Web, something that can get viral and turn semantics into a marketing term. Problems like natural language understanding still remain difficult to solve, and the solutions do not appear to be on our horizon right now. It also appears that a semantic search engine, at least based on the ones we have seen to date, does not have a substantial advantage over Google. We are seeing the rise of early Semantic Knowledge Databases, but while we expect them to get better and more interesting, they are more likely to be the stepping stones to the killer app, rather than the app itself.

In the mean time, we are seeing the rise of shortcut technologies, which leverage the basic semantics of the content, like URL and simple context analysis, to deliver relevant information, links, and media directly into the page. While still very early, these technologies hold the most promise because they are simple and useful. We expect that the next generation of these technologies in conjunction with personalization will deliver an interesting alternative to search -- contextual discovery. We will discuss this alternative in more detail in a future post.

Now tell us what you think the killer app for Semantic Web will be? Which of these technologies do you think is the most promising?

Comment from Danny on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T12:22:04Z

Quick question - what's the killer app of the Web?

While some specific killer app may emerge for the Semantic Web, we might have to wait a very long time. We get utility and fun from thousands of different apps on the Web, I don't see any reason it should be any different for the Semantic Web - which is after all an extension into data of the document Web.

Hmm, what's the killer app of computers?

Comment from Mikael Bergkvist on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T13:17:32Z

It's too early for a semantic killer app.
First must come the app that clearly illuminates what exactly can be done with it.
I'm a cynic, and I dont belive there will be a killer app until a while after *that* has happened.
Also, I'm afraid that whatever company does that, will probably see imitations almost immidiatly coming from Google, Yahoo, Facebook and / or Microsoft, killing their market.
Any semantic representation of data benefits from having the data to begin with.
So, I dont think we'll see a killer app any time soon.
It wont happen during 2008, but possibly around 2010.

Comment from Antoine of MMM/Brighthand on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T13:40:13Z

Well, if the semantic web is to be realized, then it will not be one "app" that makes it so. A semantic web will be the tie that binds several apps, most of which are described in the various sub-areas of this article. The key is making the content semantic so that across these subareas there is less "redo" and more "just do."

Plainly said, the semantic web is not an app or a service, but a glue between them all. It should be viewed and used in that way first, not only or last.

Comment from Новости Web 2.0, Веб сервисы, Социальные сети, Мэшап, AJAX, Теги on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T13:59:29Z

great material. thanks!

Comment from Todd on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T14:13:25Z

I don't know what the money making commercial "killer app" is for the Semantic Web, but for me personally it has always been about context sensitive location based information.

I have always wanted information that is related to my physical place in the real world. Abstractions or best guesses by machines who are unaware of where I am or assume I am at the same desktop computer do have any true value to me.

Example, I am driving in my car running errands, traffic is terrible, and my Yahoo calender has an entry for me to meet a business contact in one hour, but I have another two hours of running around left to do. Is there anyone in my trusted friends list already out and about who I can ask to pick something up for me so I can meet my business contact? Please semantic that up for me soon.

Comment from Fawaz on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T15:06:25Z

It's too early to decide what the killer app will be, I think we're missing the "business motivation" in Semantic Web, which is an important factor in the killer app.

Comment from Yakov on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T15:13:43Z

Here is the one - a Quintura search widget.
Click Embed! on www.quintura.com to get code and embed a 'search cloud' onto a web or blog page
The Compete chart illustrates a viral effect of this app since we introduced it two months ago http://siteanalytics.compete.com/quintura.com+/

Comment from Alain Marsily on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T15:22:17Z

When I read your article for a Semantic Web "killer app" search, I feel being in the time the market was looking for a "Groupware" killer app ! At that time, the market was looking (almost inventing !?) a next step in the way to use PCs networked !.

For me, the SW should be a natural step towards better info manipulations. Today, most search engines provide a bunch of "2 basic lines of text including searched strings/words/text" and sometimes a little more.

No major improvement speed is expected in "word/string" searches. Natural languages aren't improving results or efficiency. In fact, too much sci-fi/"HAL" reminiscences !

Future in search engines will be interactive (live) document manipulations (in 3D) and comparisons where visualization of relevant infos will be far more superior vs today engines. Where new link suggestions will be provided based on personal criteria - user centric data (personal rankings !) and interests.

Today, searches are really fast but users are loosing to much time in the search of valuable and relevant contents. We need search engines better comparing, analyzing, clipping... contents to assist searchers !

That's only for search engines... but SW will evolve in many aspects of user centric needs : better assistance, pre-analysis of info/doc interconnections, reducing redundancy, leveraging personal silos,...

Comment from Rob on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T15:34:48Z

There will be no one killer app on the semantic web. I think the article explains that. Just as there is no one killer vacation, no one perfect anything. The killer app for the semantic web will be a personalized 'thing'. What is killer for me is not killer for my cube neighbors, or my real neighbors, or anyone else for that fact. The semantic web itself, then, will be the killer app, because it will be exactly what I need it to be and exactly what YOU need it to be. Right?

Comment from NitinK on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T15:41:39Z

Hi, Alex:

Great post! This is a question I've been wondering about, too.

By a happy coincidence, this is exactly the web poll I've currently been running on the Software Abstractions blog:
Web Poll: What is the *Killer App* for Semantic Web technology?

The choices being offered for killer app are:

Internet Search (a la Powerset )

Enterprise applications - Supply Chain, Sales Force Automation, et al

Social Networking (a la twine )

Verticals - Travel, Finance, and the like

None; this technology is not real anyway!

Other: something else?

I will post the results I have shortly. I invite the readers of this post to go there to vote! :-)

Comment from ITrush on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T15:47:47Z

Umm, whatever it is RWW, keep us posted ok. Nice Post!

Nhick
http://www.itrush.com

Comment from sandy on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T16:19:00Z

Semantic is a difficult problem. The computer should understand what human think. I think it belongs to machine learning and AI planning in theory.

With mobile semantic web, we develop a mobile transcoding website (http://www.bywifi.com) for internet websites. When given a request URL for any web site, www.bywifi.com does some sorts of on-the-fly edits of the page to make it usable on the small screen of a mobile phone. www.bywifi.com cleverly collapses bulky navigation elements to give users quicker access to a site's main content and auto-wraps the large paragraphs based on each device's limits.

Comment from Yihong Ding on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T16:19:04Z

Alex,

I like your writing and most of your posts are very much insightful. Again, this one outlines several key issues in developing killer applications for Semantic Web. Thank you for your work.

I agree with all of your points. But you may have missed one issue that is essential to be "killing", i.e., simplicity. Why is it so difficult to create a SW killer application when there are certainly thousands of brilliant SW researchers in the world? It is because of simplicity. You have mentioned so many complex areas and it is hard to figure out a simple way combining them together. This is the real problem on the application design part of the Semantic web.

Yihong

Comment from John on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T16:46:34Z

It would appear that the problem of making computers intelligent, understanding machines must be solved before the dream of the Semantic Web can be realized. Otherwise it’s just linking of nodes with similar attributes (i.e. text patterns) to model a network of connections that simulate semantic understanding. Even this simulated semantic web would be useful, but humans will still have to code the relationships at some point in the process just as they have to code web content today. I think a true semantic web is very far off in the future.

Comment from Danny on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T16:52:55Z

Apologies for my lack of originality in my previous comment Alex - I was just pointed to this: when asked back in 2001 (for the classic Scientific American article), Tim Berners-Lee said:

"The Semantic Web is the killer app."

He continued:

"The point here is that the abilities of the Semantic Web are too general to be thought about in terms of solving one key problem or creating one essential gizmo. It will have uses we haven't dreamed of."

Nevertheless, we can foresee some disarming (if not actually killer) apps that will drive initial use... [examples given]

Comment from kayvaan on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T17:11:48Z

Kind of a nitpick, but people "care more about fun than utility" (paraphrasing)?

Maybe the 'tweens on facebook do, but most people I know see the web foremost as a utility and only secondarily as fun... :)

Granted, the web is both utile AND fun, but...

Don't sell the web short. It's not just a giant chatroom anymore. :))

Comment from Alan Wilensky on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T17:12:05Z

Some of the best work on tools and database super server infrastructure comes from the unknowns laboring in virtual obscurity. Take OpenLink Software for instance. Kingsley Idehen has been pursuing the dream of making systems that leverage existing databases with semantic technology.

Also, the real opportunity has not been in the big semantic web, where everything is OWL /RDF - but in the small semantic web, where ones personal information, correspondence, messages, and local document data is organized in novel ways, relationships between previously disconnected data revealed, and the personal workspace evolved.

The current work on Modular ontologies is very interesting, and is just making its way into tools.

Comment from Dave on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T17:17:33Z

Good post - but I always thinks it spells trouble for a technology when the community can devote effort to debating the killer app question :-)

Perhaps you are getting to the answer with the observation of successful technologies often being infrastructural rather than application based. Consumer never became aware of XML through a killer app, but it provided interoperability benefits for application developers that means it is now everywhere under the hood.

For users the semantic web has two fundamental problems. You touch on the lack of pay-off on the effort needed to provide semantic mark-up. The other is how to know what semantic mark-up can be trusted as accurate, regardless of whether it is generated manually or automatically.

For the semantic web, the real hope is that accelerating change on the web will force app developers to realise that interoperability with unknown future systems is as important as with known existing ones. The nice model extensibility properties of ontologies can solve this without the need to develop all those data import/export filters. Of course then the problem will then be data obesity - roll on the forgetful web :-)

Comment from Kingsley Idehen on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T17:24:06Z

Alax,

Some additions to your links since we are all contributing data to a web driven global graph etc..

1. DBpedia (if you are going to list Freebase) which is ground zero for Linking Open Data across Data Spaces on the emerging Web of Linked Data (nee. Semantic Web )

2. If you are going to List Twine then also think of OpenLink Data Spaces - a solution that solves the real problem of meshing Identity and User Data & Content on the Web (i.e. make all the Weblogs, Bookmarks, Photo Galleries, Calendars, Wikis etc.. part of the Giant Global Graph of Linked Data)

**The real Killer application of the Semantic Web is the URI or IRI (i.e the Architecture of the Web Itself). This is the essential component of the Web's architecture that makes Linked Data on the Web possible, by providing a global Data Object (Resource in Web parlance) Identification mechanism they uses HTTP to achieve Location, Structure, and Value independence.**

Comment from Jeremy G. on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T17:27:03Z

A short step that would make semantic search killer for me involves filtering out redundant search results. Imagine if Google never showed you the same result twice (such as a hundred hits off the same press release excerpt); or, if you never got a Google Alert with a repetitive result. It's a fundamental attribute of the semantic web to understand context so a search service that filtered out redundancy would be, if not killer, at the very least game-changing.

Comment from Kingsley Idehen on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T17:29:53Z

Alex,

Oops! Typo re. your name in my prior mail.

In fact, the Killer Application of the Semantic Web is Linked Data :-)

Comment from Alan Wilensky on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T17:30:25Z

The vexing problem was historically that an ontological model has to be frozen in place, and the markup sets developed, way before any server side or client code is even touched.

In the brand monitoring business, the fight has been between the machine learning people (all stats all the time, no context), and the node people (all ontology, monolithic, huge).

You cant scope the whole linguistic world-expression. One can take certain verticals and create extensible trees for limited cases:customer service, warranty, etc.

Comment from Mike Capsambelis on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T18:22:03Z

The real benefit of the Semantic Web doesn't lie in the AI concepts or the consistency and richness of the information structures. It's the simple fact that we are moving from a document-centric world, where data is trapped in files, to an information-centric world, where individual data objects are the currency shared among people and computers.

People are doing this all over the place today, but the Semantic Web opens information-centricity to the world. The applications are years or more behind the data rendering, but we'll get there.

I do think there will be a killer app though - something that jumps out of the vertical realm and into the mainstream. But I don't have anything more than a few wild guesses.

Comment from Jayne Dutra on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T19:42:05Z

To answer Todd who posted on January 10th: if the problem is finding your friends whio may be out and about, there is a app called Twitter. If you loaded in your friends list to Twitter, you could do exactly what you're describing.

As for the SW, I think we have a long way to go yet, but we are using SW technologies to improve our enterprise search capability. The ability to embed relationships using RDF so that the system can suggest related items is going to be very powerful when we're done.

Comment from TomTague on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T22:24:47Z

I know what my killer semantic app is – but first I’ll need to step back a little bit. To 1605 in fact – the year the first newspaper was published. Here, for the first time, we had a structured mechanism for locating, aggregating, filtering and presenting news to consumers.

Then very little of substance happened for about the next 400 years. Yes - we had an explosion in volume, specialization and accessibility – but the basic model of my news and information being packaged in somebody else’s container (newspaper, broadsheet, journal, whatever) remained fundamentally unchanged.

The along comes the web. I think it was Web 1.0. I’ve lost track. And what fundamentally changed was… nothing. Yes the volume exploded, specialization exploded and the latency for delivering content was dramatically reduced. But I still went to a container (aka site) to read what they wanted to tell me.

Fast forward a few years and here we are at Web 2.0. What has fundamentally changed? Quite a lot really. Besides the social networks, user generated content and other phenomena we’ve seen one fundamental – and important – shift: the atomization of content.

It’s like someone took a pair of scissors and snipped out every article (or at least the headlines – we’ll come back to that) from tens of thousands of sources and dumped them into the plumbing. We’ve moved from the electronic equivalent of newspapers into a raging blizzard of clippings. We’re living in a world of content in motion.

And, for the most part, it’s not a whole lot better. RSS is great. RSS puts content into motion – but for the most part it still ties me to the specific container that generated that content. Things like Technorati are great. They collect big parts of the blizzard and at least give me a chance to filter through it to find out what I care about. Google helps and it at least keeps things simple.

- If I use the right keywords.

- If the article contains those keywords.

- If there’s enough of the article present in the feed to even see those keywords.

But – here’s the catch. I don’t read about keywords I care about. I read about topics and people and companies and events and issues and geographies that I care about.

So – here’s my killer app. Go capture the blizzard of atomized content from news to blog entries to whatever. Figure out what it’s all about and let me build my personal Web 2.0 content reader. I don’t want to select my content by broad categories (National News – what the heck does that mean?) and I don't want to select it by container/brand, I want to be able to tell you interactively about the things I care about and I want you to give me the most relevant content. De-duplicated. With trustworthy stuff near the top.

I care about significant changes in the companies I work with. I don’t want to type “(hired or fired or appointed or left or departed or accepted) and (recall or announced or released or developed") and “IBM or International Business Machines or IBM Canada Ltd or Oracle or Sun.) - I just want to tell you I care about significant developments at the following companies.

In short - I care about the semantics of the content - not the words a particular author used to describe what's happening.

I care about what my friends and associates care about. Go harvest my social networks and make sure I get news that's relevant to their lives. I may even let you read my email if that helps to flesh out my network.

I care about what the Vox populi cares about. Well - at least a little bit. Pay attention to what others are reading and be smart about forwarding me content that might be interesting.

Do all of that, make it intuitive, keep it simple and keep me informed. I promise I'll click on at least one advertisement a day in exchange.

Comment from otto neo lente on 2008-01-10

2008-01-10T22:29:34Z

Maybe the killerapp will come in the form of a network of applications around already.
The DataPortability movement might be the beginning of this: http://www.dataportability.org/

Comment from michael on 2008-01-10

2008-01-11T01:37:38Z

@Danny:
"Quick question - what's the killer app of the Web?"
The Web has multiple killer apps, but if you mean what pushed it over the edge into mainstream I'd say it was a mixture of email (demand for easy and free communication for business & personal use), porn, and shopping (business saw an opportunity to make money; public saw convenience).

The way I see it, the 'killer app' of the semantic web can't just be something cool that can be accomplished, but will necessarily be something that people and businesses can make (or save) oodles of money by using.

Comment from Ben Tremblay on 2008-01-10

2008-01-11T03:25:50Z

Woa ... shut my mouth and call me tongue-tied! I was going to get all boots&saddles and hop onto my hobby horse (like I did on this precise topic earlier in the day) but ... gall-dang, mahn, that is one fine piece of rapportage! (You know, like rapporteur ... my #themeword is "rapport" ... see how the denotation kinda does a 90 degree turn in there when the word moves from French to English? Yaaa ... that's the stuff I'm into. Data + meaning = information)

What comes to mind fresh and extemporare is how I usta be all gung.ho about scientific visualization ... got into VRML ... got into concept mapping ... working on taxonomy (ethology and psych/criminoloy) and ontology (heh; abhidharma!) after years/decades trafficing [SP?] in public discourse concerning policy ... but something about schema theory got me thinking orthogonally ... which brings me here.

Looking for a "killer app"?
Well, going about it that way is totally forgivable ... and entirely wrong-headed.

With the dandy set of hammers we've assembled we should be looking for the problem, rather than wearing the more swank marketing hat we can find and then going off in search of some opportunity to join the mutual admiration society.

Oh-wooops, I did it again. *shrug*

Great rapportage ... nice effort ... RWW rocks steady!

^5
--bentrem

Comment from Andy on 2008-01-10

2008-01-11T05:58:43Z

I think getting to the social graph should be included. Portability and the likes.

Comment from David Scott Lewis on 2008-01-10

2008-01-11T06:07:18Z

Killer apps evolve. Spreadsheets drove the adoption of PCs, email drove the adoption of the internet, arguable web-based email and communications drove the adoption of the web.

My take: Social networking will drive the adoption of semweb. But it have to be simple and painless, what many may envision as Facebook 3.0.

Twine will solve this problem. I've written a lot about Twine, have a good take on what makes it tick. See doiop.com/Crunchies and doiop.com/Twine .

Comment from Jbour on 2008-01-10

2008-01-11T06:56:51Z

There are a few for me. One that really stands out is dBelement's MindDojo. This Brain Training (/BrainAge) game has really improved my commute to work. http://dbelement.com

Comment from Samuel Driessen on 2008-01-11

2008-01-11T08:27:42Z

Great post Alex. Thanks.
What my killer app would be? It would be something like this. A tool that helps me when I write emails and documents. It reminds me of related (truly related, not just based on key word comparison) emails, documents (I wrote before), Internet pages (I visited before), etc. in a non-intrusive way.

Comment from subcorpus on 2008-01-11

2008-01-11T14:03:41Z

my killer app would be something that tells me how to do stuff that i dunno ...
anyone can people do stuff that they know ...
semantic should be different ...

Comment from nanpanman on 2008-01-11

2008-01-11T19:25:46Z

Context is the killer app.

You cannot separate relevance from context. Contextual tagging can be done automatically by the devices you wear and applications you use on a daily basis.

Context is the 5W1H: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How. If we can build a standardized framework that can pull this off and deliver the meta data for entities, activities, time, location, relation and procedures we will have a solid foundation for the semantic web.

Comment from pawel lubczonok on 2008-01-11

2008-01-11T22:25:20Z

Apart from simplistic applications the current forms of expression and theory for semantic web are way to shallow to allow some of the more sophisticated ideas for killer apps.

One of the most important problems facing the IT industry is its intrinsic complexity which is increasing quickly.

“The obstacle is complexity. Dealing with it is the single most important challenge facing the I/T industry. It is our next Grand Challenge.” – Paul Horn - IBM

I believe that semantically based approach is the way to address this complexity.

So, maybe, we should not seek killer apps but rather a new theory that can support new semantic infrastructure.

Pawel Lubczonok

Comment from Peter Bekel on 2008-01-12

2008-01-12T21:38:50Z

Alex, very good post. It shows realism in what we can expect from the Semantic Web. One remark on the Social Graph: you say the Social Graph isn't really related to the SW. However, Berners-Lee talks in his article about the Giant Global Graph, and according to me the GGG is definitely part of the Semantic Web. You give the best definition of the SW yourself in your own article about the New Approach to the Semantic Web.
I think the GGG is definitely the framework that can be a basis for a killer SW app. The GGG however is far to inmature at this moment to build such an app upon.

Comment from rickdog on 2008-01-12

2008-01-13T06:40:06Z

#25 TomTague - isn't what you are describing something that Particls is trying to do?

Comment from Bummer Han on 2008-01-13

2008-01-13T19:34:25Z

The killer application will be the Semantic Web itself.

Semantic applications will be beyond just a web browser, it will be about intuitive information and connected data - not presentation - it will be about a ubiquitous language, spanning human languages, auditory and multi-dimensional experiences.

Mobile Devices is irrelevant, XML is just a vessel. A web search will not be just keywords or even text.

Comment from Nerrdy on 2008-01-16

2008-01-16T15:55:33Z

wait, before we even get into the "promising" applications (if any, lol), let's talk about the technology.

wasn't the goal of semantic web to serve for the conveniences of the users?

So what's the point if users have to tag and identify FOR THE COMPUTERS how they want their data/input/info to be processed? (and what about compatibility? some ppl are serious about using Python) Computers should do the dirty work, not us!!

(anyone who's thinking of a comeback like "so you prefer to use a paper accounting book cuz you are lazy to develop Excel?," silence! We are talking about data processing of 92,017 terabytes on the internet -and thats stats for webpages only, in 2002; heaven knows what incremental rise has occured since then- and that is a crap load of XMLing to do, for this bottom-up tech to actually be useful.)

I'm not doing it so I don't have a say, but why don't they try to develop more of the "machine-understand-human" technology?

As a concerned netizen though, I did my share of the research and found some promising technologies which could be developed for usage in truly 'convenient' semantic web. For anyone who's interested, here's a link of one of them which I found most hip; they used linguistics theory to develop their algorithm.
(http://www.linguisticagents.com/english/List.aspx?Item=358&Section=421)

As for security and physhing issues of bottom-ups, don't get me started, it's gonna take too much time and space. (but anyone who wants to talk about it, e-mail me or something and we can have a decent conversation about it :D)

Comment from ali1k on 2008-01-27

2008-01-27T14:46:07Z

Hi, great review on semantic web aplications,but i think you forgot to talk about semantic web services and its applications!

Comment from alan on 2008-01-29

2008-01-29T20:59:01Z

Semantic web needs semantic people. So human to human is the semantic frontier. Therefore, social network plus intelligence on information only can deal with all differents poiint of view and kind of information people need. Yes. Waiting for the next big app.

Comment from Alain on 2008-01-30

2008-01-31T02:22:39Z

My killer app would be something that AUTHORS RSS-feeds, web-apps, and web-services ... everything people might want to do, with the Semantic Web, and Web 1.0 too when it's relevant to do so .... to create shared open-source knowledge-bases, ontologies, wares, services, etc. But not just *any* authoring system. I envision a WYSIWYG IDE with a scripting framework where the focus is primarily on SIMPLICITY, e.g. masking the complexities. Close contenders will be "Rapid Application Development" (RAD), framework & tools for collaborative development and deployment, a natural-language-like scripting language, etc. Interoperability, of course.. with any XML-encoded data, and XML-savvy programs & services, including software agents (some of these AI).

Is this just a dream? A figment of my imagination? NO! It's a project that goes by the name of XulCard : http://pan.uqam.ca/xc/pmwiki.php .

Status of the project: XulCard is presently being designed by a tiny community of xCard fans, from within a wiki. The design of this web app leverages ALL of the relevant web-standards; Web 1.0 as well as Web 2.0 and beyond: for dates, times, numbers.... Creative Commons, Dublin Core, FOAF, etc.. using CSS, XML, XML-Schema, RDF, RDF-Schema (in progress), OWL (soon), XSLT and xPath (near future) ; and XUL or SVG or Flash or d-HTML and/or AJAX, for the client-side.

Please note: That there's nothing to download-or-test at this point, but there will be in the coming weeks/months. We are focused on the DESIGN right now, and YES it's being done *up-front* albeit it will also be open to the inputs of its eventual users.

Conclusion: This will be a "killer app" because it will EMPOWER us (ordinary folks, as well as power-users and hackers) to create and host SemanticWeb applications, services, ontologies, models, shared information repositories, etc .. With the ease of an IDE, as simple as HyperCard! Stay tuned :-))