[image from dullhunk]

The first issue of Nodalities, a new semantic web magazine [available as PDF or using their viewer], is out. I’ve expressed my skepticism at a number of the more grandiose semantic web visions I’ve been exposed to– and Nodalities isn’t completely without its bits of true believer ideology– but on the whole it’s an interesting, relatively accessible read.

I particularly appreciate that transcriptions of audio interviews and podcasts– so much easier and more convenient to consume! A few snippets that I found interesting:

Q. … what do you think the biggest challenges facing Semantic Web adoption and Semantic Web rollout are over the next couple of years?

Tim Berners-Lee: … I suppose, I think, the paradigm shift is the biggest hurdle. The fact that when you think in terms of Semantic Web, you think differently. It was actually a problem for the Web too. People look back and they say, “Well, the Web is so easy, you just download the Web browser and then you could just…” And the moment they use the Web browser, you had to write HTML, and then you could edit HTML pages with editors and the whole world took off.

Well actually, before there was a significant amount of Web, it was really difficult to persuade people it would be a good idea. They just didn’t understand how fundamentally essential it would be to be on the Web. They didn’t understand what a kick they’d get out of finding that somebody had reused their information in a different way. They didn’t understand how beneficial it would be to have more or less all information that they could think of available.

And imagining it, now imagine people write a SPARQL query as though the world, as though all the data to which you actually legally practically have access, actually is technically available to you as well – just anything which comes up into your mind as a scientist, as a businessman, just as a school kid wondering the answer to a science project question… There are obviously a set of people who get it.

They have a twinkle in their eye, they are incredibly fired up, because they understand it is going to be really really exciting when it all happens. To a certain extent, they are finding that these areas like life science, like social networking, like the Linked Open Data projects, where it is all starting to come together.

[image by danbri]

And this from Greg Boutin from a podcast called The Semantic Gang:

And I think when we ask the question, “Is the Semantic Web about to go mainstream?” to me, when I think about the criteria, one of them is can the Semantic Web generate its own money beyond venture capital money that’s going into the sector? Are there people paying real dollars for those applications that are actually useful?

And then you can split the problem into maybe two fields. Right now we are seeing a lot of efforts towards the B2B sector and that may be very well where the major problem lies that can be addressed by the Semantic Web because companies have a pressing need to really link data within and beyond their organization.

But beyond that, for me like the real criterion is going to be mainstream adoption by end users, by the actual consumer. And a bit like we saw with the Web, I mean, Google has really made it a mainstream, has made the – I mean Yahoo! and Google have made the entire mainstream specification just by making it so much easier for the average person to understand it and to find what they were looking for on it.