Stefano Mazzocchi, via his blog: Stefano's Linotype, delivers insightful contribution to the ongoing effort to recapture the essence of the original Semantic Web vision.

The Semantic Web is about granular exposure of the underlying web-of-data that fuels the World Wide Web. It models "Web Data" using a Directed Graph Data Model (back-to-the-future: Network Model Database) called RDF.

In line with contemporary database technology thinking, the Semantic Web also seeks to expose Web Data to architects, developers, and users via a concrete Conceptual Layer that is defined using RDF Schema.

The abstract nature of Conceptual Models implies that actual instance data (Entities, Attributes, and Relationships/Associations) occurs by way of "Logical to Conceptual" schema mapping and data generation that can involve a myriad of logical data sources (SQL, XML, Object databases, traditional web content, RSS/Atom feeds etc.). Thus, by implication, it is safe assume that the Semantic Web's construction is basically a Data Integration and exposure effort. The point that Stefano alludes to in the blog post excerpts that follow:

The semantic web is really just data integration at a global scale. Some of this data might end up being consistent, detailed and small enough to perform symbolic reasoning on, but even if this is the case, that would be such a small, expensive and fragile island of knowledge that it would have the same impact on the world as calculus had on deciding to invade Iraq.

The biggest problem we face right now is a way to 'link' information that comes from different sources that can scale to hundreds of millions of statements (and hundreds of thousands of equivalences). Equivalences and subclasses are the only things that we have ever needed of OWL and RDFS, we want to 'connect' dots that otherwise would be unconnected. We want to suggest people to use whatever ontology pleases them and then think of just mapping it against existing ones later. This is easier to bootstrap than to force them to agree on a conceptualization before they even know how to start!

Additional insightful material from Stefano:

1. A No-Nonsense Guide to Semantic Web Specs for XML People [Part I]
2. A No-nonsense Guide to Semantic Web Specs for XML People [Part II]

Benjamin Nowack also chimes into this conversation via his simple guide to understanding Data, Information, and Knowledge in relation so the Semantic Web.

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