I'm in San Jose and the Semantic Technology Conference 2006 has just wrapped up. A good time, as always, and very well attended (way up from even last year. This is an extraordinarily well organized conference). But I did want to throw up one impression I got from one of the first talks I went to.
The talk discussed an effort in "convergence" of MDA/UML, RDF/OWL, Web
Services and Topic Maps. Apparently all the big committees are
involved, from OMG, W3C, ISO, etc. Having been an enthusiastic early
adopter in the first three technologies, I was violently struck by the
casually side-stepped enormousness of this undertaking. In my view, all
four projects had promising roots and were all eventually buried under
the weight of their own complexity. And yet the convergence effort
that's being touted seems little more sophisticated than balling all
these behemoths together. I wonder what's the purpose. I can't imagine
the result will be greater adoption for these technologies taken
together. Many potential users already ignore them because of the
barrier of impenetrable mumbo-jumbo. I can't imagine there would be
much cross-pollination within these technologies because without brutal
simplification and profiling model mismatches would make it impractical
for an application to efficiently cross the bridge from one semantic
modeling technology to the other.
I came to this conference to talk about how Microformats might present a slender opportunity for semantic folks to harness the volume of raw material being generated in the Web 2.0 craze. The trade-off is that the Web 2.0 craze produces a huge amount of crap metadata, and someone will have to clean up the mess in the resulting RDF models even if GRDDL is ever deployed widely enough to generate models worth the effort. And let's not even start on the inevitable meltdown of "folksonomies" (I predict formation of a black hole of fundamental crapitational force). I replaced my previous year's talk about how managers of controlled information systems could harness XML schemata for semantic transparency. I think next year I should go back to that. It's quite practical, as I've determined in my consulting experience. I'm not sure hitching information pipelines to Web 2.0 is the least bit practical.
I'm struck by the appearance of two extremes in popular fields of distributed information management (and all you Semantic Technology pooh-pooh-ers would be gob-smacked if you had any idea how deadly seriously Big Business is taking this stuff: it's popular in terms of dollars and cents, even if it's not the gleam in your favorite blogger's eye). On one hand we have the Daedalos committee fastening labyrinth to labyrinth. On the other hand we have the tower of Web 2.0 Babel. We need a mob in the middle to burn 80% of the AI-one-more-time-for-your-mind-magic off of RDF, 80% of the chicago-cluster-consultant-diesel off of MDA, 80% of the toolkit-vendor-flypaper off of Web services. Once the ashes clear, we need folks to build lightweight tools that actually would help with extracting value from distributed information systems without scaring off the non-Ph.D.s. I still think XML is the key, and that XML schema systems should have been addressing semantic transparency from the start, rather than getting tied up in static typing bondage and discipline.
I have no idea whether I can do anything about the cluster-fuck besides ranting, but I'll be squeezing neurons hard until XTech, which does have the eminent advantage of being an in-person meeting of the semantic, XML and Web 2.0 crowds.
Let's dance in Amsterdam, potnas.
See also:
- "Is RDF moving beyond the desperate hacker? And what of Microformats?"
- "The many heads of XML modeling"
- "XOXO versus Atom versus XBEL for Web feed lists?"
- "XML, The Model Driven Architecture, and RDF"
- "Managing XML libraries"