Why Semantic Web Software Must Be Easy(er) to Use
Lee Feigenbaum of Cambridge Semantics writes:
Over on my personal blog, I’ve written a couple of posts that outline two key thoughts on the transformative effects that Semantic Web technologies can have in the enterprise:
- Why Semantic Web Technologies: Are We Asking the Wrong Question? — Semantic Web technologies take enterprise problems that would take too long or too many resources to solve with traditional technologies and make them tractable, so you end up being able to apply technology and automation to far more day-to-day business problems then you could before.
- Saving Months, Not Milliseconds: Do More Faster with the Semantic Web — The flexibility of Semantic Web technologies mean that you can save days, weeks, or months of calendar time compared to approaches that use traditional technologies.
There’s a key corrollary of these two observations that you need to keep in mind when building, browsing, or buying Semantic Web software. Semantic Web software must be easy to use.
On the surface, this sounds a bit trite. Surely we should demand that all software be easy to use, right? While ease of use is clearly an important goal in software design in general, I’d argue that it’s absolutely crucial to successfully realizing the value from Semantic Web software….
I think Lee has a point about software, in this case, Semantic Web software, needs to be easy to use.
It isn’t that hard to come up with parallel examples from W3C specs. Take XML for example. Sure, there are DocBook users but compare the number of XML users when you count DocBook users versus XML users when you count users of OpenOffice, LibreOffice, KOffice, MS Word. Several orders of magnitude in favor of the latter. Why? Because it is easier to author XML using better interfaces than exist for DocBook.
Where I disagree with Lee is where he claims:
The point of semantic web tech is not that it’s revolutionary – it’s not cold fusion, interstellar flight, quantum computing – it’s an evolutionary advantage – you could do these projects with traditional techs but they’re just hard enough to be impractical, so IT shops don’t – that’s what’s changing here. Once the technologies and tools are good enough to turn “no-go” into “go”, you can start pulling together the data in your department’s 3 key databases; you can start automating data exchange between your group and a key supply-chain partner; you can start letting your line-of-business managers define their own visualizations, reports, and alerts that change on a daily basis. And when you start solving enough of these sorts of problems, you derive value that can fundamentally affect the way your company does business. (from Asking the Wrong Question)
and
Calendar time is what matters. If my relational database application renders a sales forecast report in 500 milliseconds while my Semantic Web application takes 5 seconds, you might hear people say that the relational approach is 10 times faster than the Semantic Web approach. But if it took six months to design and build the relational solution versus two weeks for the Semantic Web solution, Semantic Sam will be adjusting his supply chain and improving his efficiencies long before Relational Randy has even seen his first report. The Semantic Web lets you do things fast, in calendar time. (from Saving Months, Not Milliseconds)
First, you will notice that Lee doesn’t cite any examples in either case. Which would be the first thing you would expect to see from a marketing document. “Our foobar is quicker, faster, better at X that its competitors.” Even if the test results are cooked, they still give concrete examples.
Second, the truth is for the Semantic Web (original recipe) or Semantic Web (linked data special blend) or topic maps or conceptual graphs or whatever, semantic integration is hard. If it were easy, do you think we would have witnessed the ten year slide from the Scientific American Semantic Web original to the current day, linked data version?
Third, semantic diversity has existed for the length of recorded language, depending on whose estimates you accept, 4,000 to 5,000 years. And there has been no shortage of people with a plan to eliminate semantic diversity all that time. Semantic diversity persists to this day. If people haven’t been able to eliminate semantic diversity in 4,000 to 5,000 years, what chance does an automated abacus have?
[…] jQuery("#errors*").hide(); window.location= data.themeInternalUrl; } }); } tm.durusau.net – Today, 8:38 […]
Pingback by Why Semantic Web Software Must Be Easy(er) to Use « Another Word For It | Bric_e's SW | Scoop.it — January 19, 2012 @ 8:38 am