The Semantic Web as Innovation Based on Literature6

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The Semantic web as InnovationBased on Literature

Course: Innovation and Information

Lecturer: Michel Avital

Name: Sylvain Wielkens (0364657)Date: 12-05-2010


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Table of Contents

The Semantic web as Innovation ................................ ................................ ............................ 1

Foreword................................ ................................ ................................ ................................ 3

Introduction................................ ................................ ................................ ............................ 3

The process of innovation................................ ................................ ................................ ....... 3

Generating stage (1) ................................ ................................ ................................ ........... 5

Conceptualizing and optimizing stage (2&3) ................................ ................................ ..... 6

Implementing and accepting stage (4)................................ ................................ ................. 9

Future and the beginning of a new cycle (5&1)................................ ................................ . 10

Comparison interviews with literature ................................ ................................ .................. 13

Generating stage................................ ................................ ................................ ............... 13

Conceptualizing and optimizing stage................................ ................................ ............... 14

Implementing and accepting stage ................................ ................................ .................... 16

Future and the beginning of a new cycle ................................ ................................ ........... 18

Discussion&Findings ................................ ................................ ................................ ........... 19

Literature ................................ ................................ ................................ ............................. 20


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between an invention and an innovation. An invention of means something that hasn't been

done/made before, but an innovation means to transform the invention into a social practice.

What's the use of an idea when it's not adopted?

"Innovation is therefore a social transformation in a community". (Denning, 2004, p 15)

Basadur (2000) argues that it is important for an innovation to succeed to be aware and toexecute all the stages he defined as the simplex innovation process. This process consist of

four stages: generating, conceptualizing, optimizing and implementing stage.

Figure 1. Four stages of the innovation process (Basadur, 2000, p61)

Basadur (2000) defines these stages as follows:

In the generating stage one is searching for new problems to be solved. What is the current

situation and how can it be improved? What are the needs of the community?

In the conceptualization stage one tries to define the problem(s) specifically, though keeping

an open mind so that new challenges that might arise along the road will be considered as

well. Moreover one should try to tackle the problem from different kinds of perspectives,

because there are more ways that lead to Rome and the first doesn't have to be the best.

In the optimizing stage one evaluates the ideas and the solutions to the challenges, and

visualizes how these ideas and solutions can be put into practice.


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In the fourth stage, the implementing stage, the solutions are put into action. At this point it is

important to gain acceptance from the audience. After all, it's the audience who should adopt

the innovation into practice to crown the invention into an innovation. An important part of

selling the idea to the community is communication. If people aren't aware of the innovation,

even if it is the greatest ever, it won't fly. But people should also be convinced that the

innovation will have benefits to their lives. They should be properly informed about how tomake use of it.

When an innovation achieved acceptance the process of innovation start all over again; old

innovation nurture new innovations. Old innovations are the breeding ground for new ideas

and new challenges.

According to the interviewees the Semantic Web is definitely an innovation. So assuming that

this is true one should be able to recognize the stages of the process of innovation in the

literature about the Semantic Web. In the next section I'll visualize and discuss the content of

these stages according to the literature. The four figures (2,3,5 and 6) presented in this section

represent how the subject of the stages are related to each other and to the innovation processof the semantic web.

Generating stage (1)

Figuur 2.Generating stage


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Tim Berners-Lee (founder of the World Wide Web) et al., 2001, published their vision of

what the Semantic Web should bring/innovate in the Scientific American. Although the paper

contained some predictions that still are far from being realized (agents and the internet of

things) it showed the goals and the foundations of the Semantic Web. Given the fact that this

paper is cited more than ten thousand times, one can say that it represents the kick-off of the

Semantic Web.

The purpose of the Semantic Web was to make the web machine processable (Benjamins,

2002. Berners-Lee, 2001. Antoniou, 2004). The web, as we know now, is chiefly based on

HTML, which is a language to create webpages. But it's structure is meant to be read by

humans and not by computers. But the Semantic Web will provide webpages that "not only

store content as a set of unrelated words in a document (as is the case with the HTML-

language), but also code their meaning and structure."(Benjamins, 2002, p. 1). "Instead of

having a web with pages that link to each other, we can have (with the same

infrastructure) a data model with information on each entity distributed over the web."

(Cardiff, 2009, p. 5) Like that the web won't only have meaning to us but also to computers.

It's important to notice that the idea of the Semantic Web isn't about to replace the current

web, but is about being an extension to the web. (Berners-Lee, 2001)

For the Semantic Web to function, reasoning and logic is required. Knowledge representation

researchers have studied these principles for decades. So it was rational to combine the web-

technologies with the knowledge representation technologies (Lassila, 2007. Berners-Lee,

2001. d'Aquin, 2008). Berners-Lee called knowledge representation "a good idea, and some

very nice demonstrations exist, but it has not yet changed the world."(Berners-Lee, 2001, p. 2)

By combining the two research areas this change can be realized in the name of the Semantic

Web. "Old ideas can become powerful solutions to new problems if brokers are skilled at

seeing such analogies" (Hargadon, 2000, p. 162)

Now that the idea of the Semantic Web has been defined the next stage of the innovation

process appears.

Conceptualizing and optimizing stage (2&3)

When the idea is set, it is important to see the big picture of the innovation. What are the

domains that the Semantic Web will influence exactly? Antoniou (2004) speaks of two

domains who will have major benefits from the Semantic Web: Search engines and

Knowledge management.

The problems with the current search engines are the following (Antoniou, 2004):

y Normally you'll get hundreds/thousands of hits with one search, though only a fewof them will be relevant to you.

y The results are highly sensitive to the vocabulary one has used. You might misssome hits because you have used different words though meaning the same.

y The hits from our search are just single web pages. Often we need information that isfound over several pages, but the search engines can only offer them one by one.


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" It is our vision that the technology of current generation of search engines has its limits. To

be able to deal with the continuous growth of the WWW (in size, languages and formats), we

need to exploit other information. This is where the Semantic Web comes in." (Benjamins,

2002, p. 1) When the information on the web is machine accessible, these problems

mentioned above can be tackled/improved.

Figure 3. Conceptualizing and optimizing stage

Knowledge management is often about getting the right information as complete as is possible

and as fast as is possible. So by improving search systems companies should be able to

retrieve the needed digital information much faster. Moreover thanks to Semantic Web

techniques they will also be able to automatically organize their data, because the computer

now can interpret the data.

Sometimes the Semantic Web is also called the Web of Data. This comes from the fact that

the data and metadata on the web will be easy to share and reuse with the new techniques.

"The Semantic Web we aspire to makes substantial reuse of existing ontologies and

data. Its a linked information space in which data is being enriched and added. It lets

users engage in the sort of serendipitous reuse and discovery of related information

thats been a hallmark of viral Web uptake." (Berners-Lee, 2006, p. 100)

Now the data has meaning to the machine, the computer can collect data from different sites

for you. The BBC semantic web project is a good example of this, which will be discussed


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In figure 2 one can find how the standards of the Semantic Web are layered on top of each

other. The URI identifies 1 resource. XML is the syntax of the language RDF. In RDF and

RDFS one can define few relation among terms, like Amsterdam is a city of The Netherlands.

With OWL (Web Ontology Language) one can define more complex relations and can add

rules to the data. And to conclude, with SparQL it is possible to query the data of the

Semantic Web. (Details of these standards can be found athttp://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/)

Implementing and accepting stage ( )

Figure 5. Implementing and accepting stage

For an innovation to become a success, or to become a 'real' innovation, it needs to be

accepted by the community. If people won't use it in everyday practice one can't benefit from

the innovative functions, so what's the use then? That's why it is important to put effort in

getting the innovation accepted. The W3C does not only recommend guidelines for the web

but it is also seen as the point where researches from different areas in the semantic web meet.

eople need to realize that it takes time for an invention to become an innovation. It isn't asimple task to get people on your boat. First the innovation has to be ready to meets its

audience. In the case of the Semantic Web it's standards need to be stable (Benjamins, 2002).

Second the audience need time to appreciate and accept the innovation. For the Semantic Web

this is quite a hard task regarding the size of its community. "It's easier to mobilize 10 percent

of a small but focused community than 10 percent of the general populace - these early

adopters are critical."(Berners-Lee, 2006, p. 99)


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That is probably the reason why for a long time the semantic web stayed inside the walls of

the academic world. But since a few years, small and big companies begin to see the benefits

of the Semantic Web. "Numerous players of various sizes are now focusing in different areas

of the Semantic Web space... As people experimented with RDF databases, they found

significant advantages over traditional structured databases in many cases, especially with

respect to embedding data on the Web"

(Lassila, 2007, p. 91)

"Although many aspects of the Semantic Web are yet to be explored, and much research

remains to be done, this technology is clearly transitioning into a serious player in the

modern Web universe."(Lassila, 2007, p. 93)

Concrete examples of companies/projects who are using Semantic Web technologies are

Yahoo, Garlik, Joost, IBM, Oracle (Lassila, 2007), MultimediaN (2006) , Linked Open Data

project, DBpedia and the BBC (Kabilarov, 2009).

The BBC Artist site is a very popular and big site. It contains all the artist, with their

background etc, that were ever heard or seen on the BBC. BBC used to have their own

content management system, which was a very expensive business for the BBC. Now they've

switched to semantic web techniques, with the result that they can present more information

whereas they spend much less. By combining data from the DBpedia (which is Wikipedia but

written in RDF) and Musicbrainz (which contains a lot of information about music artists

written in RDF) the BBC is able to construct it's BBC Artist site. (Kabilarov, 2009)

The BBC Artist site is a site which Motta in 2006 called the next generation Semantic Web

systems." In particular we observe that the latest Semantic Web systems are geared to

take advantage of the vast amount of heterogeneous semantic data available online.

Freed from the burden of creating their own semantic data, they concentrate on finding and

meaningfully combining the available semantic markup."(Motta, 2006, p. 5)

As one can see the Semantic Web is still evolving and improving itself, but a concrete basis

has been founded and it seems that the audience is starting to embrace the Semantic Web

techniques. But where is the Semantic Web heading to? What will be the future of the

innovation?

Future and the beginning of a new c cle (5&1)

The Semantic Web still has a lot of R&D issues which need to be tackled in the future. At the

moment there isn't yet a straight forward method to align and map between ontologies, though

this is the essential part that would make the linking between the data possible. The Linked

Open Data project should bring solutions in the near future. Another problem is the

computing problem. "How do we effectively query huge numbers of decentralized information

repositories of varying scales?"(Berners-Lee, 2006, p. 100). Another issue is trust. With the

Semantic Web the computer takes data from different locations, but how can we be sure that

the data is genuine/true? We need to establish trust and provenance of the content.


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"Provenancethat is, the when, where, and conditions under which data originatedhas

become a key requirement in a range of applications. We might well need the help of

researchers in areas as diverse as social network analysis and epidemiology to understand

how information and concepts spread on the Web and how to establish their provenance and

trustworthiness." (Berners-Lee, 2006, p. 100)

The fact that a lot of data will be open has the consequence that we have to think about

copyright. Creative Commons is a first step, but further research is necessary (Berners-Lee,

2006, p. 100).

Figure 6. Future and beginning of a new c ( cle (next innovation)

When regarding the future two innovation begin to take shape. One is that we are heading to

the ubiquitous web or as Frank van Harmelen called it; the internet of things (Wielkens,

2010). Everything around us will be attached to the web. " In the longer term, given that

Semantic Web technologies are maturing as a means of describing things, we could use their

representational power to describe things in the real world.One view is that the physical

objects will become Web-accessible in that we will be able to represent them via metadata.

Just like applying semantic technologies to problems of interoperability in ubiquitous

computing environments, describing physical things will expand our scope beyond the current

Web." (Lassila, 2007, p. 92,93)

The other innovation will be the Web 3.0, which is the combination of Semantic Web

technology and the Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 is also called the social web, because with its

arrival users can comment easily on each other, can contribute to communities on the web

easily and can share their media and experiences hardly without an effort.


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"The results of this combination would be powerful indeed. This would make possible a new

class of applications that could leverage the semantic relations that exist between certain

kinds of web-accessible data to automatically locate and fuse information, perform basic

reasoning, and pivot and transform representations to meet a wide variety of user needs."

(Greaves, 2009, p. 1).

Just like the interviews provided enough information describe the innovation process of the

Semantic web, the articles did too. Now it's time to compare both representations of the

innovation process.


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Compari on interviews with literature

In t i secti n I will compare t e di erent stages ofinnovation based upon t e interviews to

t e different stages ofinnovation based upon t e articles according to t e figures t at

representt e stages.

Generating stage

Figure 7. Generating stage based on arti)

les

Figure 8. Generating stage based on interviews

In t e generating stage t e interviewees and t e articles present prett much the same

information: The semantic web is the symbiosis ofthe Web technologies and the Knowledge

representation technologies. The innovation was driven by the need to make the web machine

accessible. Tim Berners-Lee, also founder ofthe WWW, started promoting this vision atthe

end of de '90. Thereby the idea/concept ofthe Semantic Web was born.


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Conceptuali ing and optimi ing stage

Figure 9. Conceptuali0 ing and optimi0 ing stage based onarticles

Figure 10. Conceptuali0 ing and optimi0 ing stage based on interviews


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When comparing the second stage of the innovation process I found a lot of similarities, but

also a lot of differences between the information from the interviews and the articles. It's not

that the information from both sources contradict each other, rather they supplement each

other. The following subjects were covered by both sources: retrieval of information (aka

search engines), integration of data on web which is covered in the article part under the name

'sharing and reuse of data' and ontologies.

As I said there are also differences to be named. First of all the papers didn't talked much

about the role of the W3C and the Semantic Web. A lot of papers mention its function --

making recommendation for the web -- but they don't go any further then a few sentences.

Another difference is the absence of the personalization function of the Semantic Web in the

articles. According to Frank van Harmelen (Wielkens, march 2010) this will be one of the

major functions of the Semantic Web, but none of the articles mention it. Maybe this is due to

the fact that it's a function which is under development, without any concrete results. But it

remains strange that the articles don't speak about it.

A closely related topic that also isn't mentioned in the articles is the privacy of the SemanticWeb. One can imagine when the web becomes more personalized one wants to keep control

over its own profile. You want to be the only one who can use/manage this information about

yourself and you surely don't want companies using it without your permission. But the

Semantic Web tends to have an open information culture. These contradictions need to be

researched further.

One other subject what the articles described in details, was only mentioned by the

interviewees briefly; the basis of the Semantic Web, which consist of ontologies and the

standards. I think that it wasn't mentioned in the interviews because it is easier to read what

the standards are all about, than to talk about them. Besides regarding the process of

innovation it is more important to know the purposes and innovative aspects of an innovationthan its techniques.


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Implementing and accepting stage

Figure 11. Implementing and accepting stage based on articles

Figure 12. Implementing and accepting stage based on interviews


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The thing that stands out, when comparing the interviews with the articles, is that the articles

talk little of the acceptation of the Semantic Web, though this is one of the most important

aspects of the innovation process. After all there isn't an innovation without acceptation of the

audience. All three interviewees could tell me why the acceptation rate of the Semantic Web

can be seen as slow. But the articles never mentioned anything about the acceptation of the

Semantic Web, till the moment that the Semantic Web steps outside the academic world.From that point on the articles inform that companies are starting to see and use the

advantages of the Semantic Web. It's obvious that the articles want to send out positive

messages about the Semantic Web, so they hide the critics, but I think it's also important for

the future of the semantic web to reflect on the messaging of it in the past.

Further the fact that DBpedia, The BBC project and the Linked Open Data project were

mentioned by all three interviewees and are mentioned in a few articles shows that these

project represent the capabilities of the present Semantic Web.


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Future and the beginning of a new cycle

Figure 13. Future and beginning of new cycle based on articles

Figure 14. Future and beginning of new cycle based on interviews

The articles and the interviewees talked much aboutthe same subjects regarding to whatthe

future ofthe semantic web should bring - provenance of data, the computing problem and the

linked open data project - and regarding whatthe step afterthe semantic web would be - the

internet ofthing/ an ubi uitous web. Apparently these are the R issues forthe coming

years. The articles added two extra dimensions: how to handle the copyrightinside the

Semantic Web and what we can expect ofthe fusion ofthe Semantic Web and the Web 2.0.


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Frank van Harmelen mentioned that in the past the Semantic Web and the Web 2.0 were seen

as competitors, but stated that they actually should reinforce each other. How this is possible

is explained in the article of Greaves (Greaves, 2009).

Discussion&Findings

The purpose of this paper was to map the different stages of the innovation process of the

Semantic Web according to the literature. Further these findings were compared to the

findings acquired by interviews of Semantic Web academics.

In general the information provided by the interviews and the information provided by the

articles resemble a lot of similarities. One can conclude that the vision of the Semantic Web is

unanimous. There are R&D project heading different ways, but the foundation are made. Here

and there they complement each other, but the different kinds of sources chiefly mention the

same aspects of the Semantic Web. This is probably also due the fact that I've only

interviewed academics who have and still contribute to the Semantic Web and that the articles

are written only by the academics who have and still contribute to the Semantic Web.

Though there is one, obvious but worth to mention, difference between the two kinds of

collecting information, namely the interviews provides an easier and more broader

understanding of the Semantic Web than the articles did. The articles tend to go deep into the

material, often beyond the scope of this paper, whereas the interviews were more on the same

level as this paper is.

The interviews as well as the articles provided enough information to give a clear picture of

the innovation process of the Semantic Web. Every stage of the process could be identified by

the sources. So it's safe and sound to state that the Semantic Web is a true innovation.

It took a long while for the Semantic Web to establish itself, but since 2008 it seems that the

audience has picked up the benefits of the innovation which results in the arrival of Semantic

applications and systems outside the academic world. Now that the Semantic Web has found

its spot in the society it's time to look at future opportunities. Two visions arise: the internet of

things and the Web 3.0. Time will tell if these 'innovations' will get accepted as well.


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Literature

Antoniou, G. and F. Van Harmelen (2004).A semantic web primer, The MIT ress.

Basadur, M., . ringle, et al. (2002). "Collaborative problem solving through creativity in

problem definition: Expanding the pie." Creativity and Innovation Management 9(1): 54-76.

Benjamins, V., J. Contreras, et al. (2002). "Six challenges for the semantic web." KR2002(ISOCO White aper).

Berners-Lee and W. Hall (2006). "The Semantic Web Revisited." IEEE Intelligent Systems.

Berners-Lee, T., J. Hendler, et al. (2001). "The semantic web." Scientific American 284(5):

34-43.

Cardiff, J. "The Evolution of the Semantic Web."

Cardoso, J. and A. Sheth (2006). "The Semantic Web and its applications." Semantic Web

Services, rocesses and Applications: 3-33.

d'Aquin, M., E. Motta, et al. (2008). "Toward a new generation of semantic web

applications." IEEE Intelligent Systems 23(3): 20-28.

Denning, . (2004). "The social life of innovation." Communications of the ACM 47(4): 19.

Denning, . and R. Dunham (2006). "Innovation as language action." Communications of the

ACM 49(5): 52.

Greaves, M. and . Mika (2009). "Semantic Web and Web 2.0." Science Direct.

Hargadon, A.; Sutton, R (2000)."Building an innovation factory." Harvard business

review.78(3):157.

Kobilarov, G., T. Scott, et al. (2009). "Media meets semantic webhow the BBCuses DBpedia

and linked data to make connections." The Semantic Web: Research and Applications: 723-

737.

Lassila, O. and J. Hendler (2007). "Embracing"Web 3.0"." IEEE Internet Computing: 90-93.

Motta, E. and M. Sabou (2006). "Next generation semantic web applications." The Semantic

WebASWC 2006: 24-29.

Schreiber, G., A. Amin, et al. (2006). "Multimedian e-culture demonstrator." The Semantic

Web-ISWC 2006: 951-958.

Wielkens, S. (2010). "The Semantic Web as Innovation (based on interviews."

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