1. An Introduction to the Semantic
Web Landscape
Lee Feigenbaum
VP Technology & Client Services, Cambridge Semantics
Co-chair, W3C SPARQL Working Group

2. Executive Summary: Semantic Web in
2010
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Semantic Web technologies in 2010 is characterized by a healthy
environment of stable, broadly-implemented core standard
technologies complemented by a number of continually emerging
new standards.
Adopters of Semantic Web technologies can choose from a wide
range of commercial and open-source interoperable tools and
systems.
Enterprise Semantic Web projects are moving beyond proofs of
concept and production pilots to larger-scale production
implementations.
Community and government projects on the World Wide Web,
buoyed by increasing support from major search engines, have
linked hundreds of public data sets into an emergent Semantic
Web.

3. “The Semantic Web”
Put explicit data on the World Wide Web in a
machine-readable fashion
…government data
…commercial data
…social data
In order to enable…
…targeted search
…data browsing
…automated agents
What is it & why do we care? (1)
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World Wide Web : Web pages :: The Semantic Web : Data

4. “Semantic Web technologies”
A family of technology standards that ‘play nice
together’, including:
Flexible data model
Expressive ontology language
Distributed query language
Drive Web sites, enterprise applications
What is it & why do we care? (2)
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The technologies enable us to build applications and solutions that
were not possible, practical, or feasible traditionally.

5. Two (different but related) takes on the same
technologies
The Semantic Web is often implemented using
Semantic Web technologies
You’ll hear about both here
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Heads or Tails?

6. Names
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7. Semantic Web
Web of Data
Giant Global Graph
Data Web
Web 3.0
Linked Data Web
Semantic Data Web
Branding
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8. A common set of technologies:
...enables diverse uses
...encourages interoperability
A coherent set of technologies:
…encourage incremental application
…provide a substantial base for innovation
A standard set of technologies:
...reduces proprietary vendor lock-in
...encourages many choices for tool sets
A Common & Coherent Set of Technology
Standards
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9. The (In)Famous Layer Cake
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10. Semantic Web Technology Timeline
1999 2001 2004 2008 20102007
RIF
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11. “Semantic technologies” generally refers to a
broad spectrum of techniques for finding
signal in large or complex data sources.
Semantic Web standards tend to be effective
tools for implementing these techniques.
Semantic (Web) Technologies?
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Semantic technologies
Semantic Web standards
• RDF – data model
• RDFS & OWL – schema, ontology, inference
• SPARQL – query
• RDFa – data in Web pages
• …
• Data mining
• Unstructured text mining / NLP
• Entity extraction
• Sentiment analysis
• Semantic search

12. The Semantic Web Paradigm
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13. The World Changes
Traditionally:
Change is costly
Semantics:
Change is cheap
The (Dynamic) Semantic Web Paradigm
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Flexible
Graph
Model
URIs for
naming
Agility
On-the-fly
RDB 1 RDB 2

14. As technologies & tools have evolved, Semantic Web
community members have progressed through stages:
2010: Where we are
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Report on… Execute on…
Semantic Web vision Initial experiments
Experiments Technology standards
Technology standards Software packages
Software packages Proofs of concept
Proofs of concept Production pilots
Production pilots Production implementations

15. 2010: Where we’re not
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Semantic Web technologies are not a ‘magic crank’ for discovering
new drugs (or solving other problems, for that matter)!
Image from Trey Ideker via Enoch Huang

16. THINGS TO LOOK FOR TODAY AND
TOMORROW
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17. How do the solutions and approaches
presented benefit from flexibility?
Can the solutions presented
be easily adapted to other
purposes?
Flexibility & Reuse
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18. How does Semantic Web technologies bring
differential value to the projects presented?
Faster development speed?
Incremental development / deployment?
Inferring new data?
Improved user / consumer / partner experience?
Something else altogether?
Value
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19. What skills are required to build and maintain
the solutions you see?
Skills
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20. What factors are helping or hindering adoption
of the projects presented?
What does the presented work tell us about
the maturity of the Semantic Web standards,
tools, market, …?
Future Directions
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21. Thanks & Questions
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lee@cambridgesemantics.com