The Semantic web as Innovation

Based on Literature

Course: Innovation and Information

Lecturer: Michel Avital
Name: Sylvain Wielkens (0364657)
Date: 12-05-2010
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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Foreword
In my previous paper The Semantic Web as Innovation (based on interviews) (Wielkens,
March 2010) I've tried to show the different steps of the innovation process of the Semantic
Web based upon interviews with academics who've made a big contribution to the Semantic
Web. In this paper I'll try to reveal those different steps of the innovation process by
reviewing literature and further I'll compare my findings based on the interview to my
findings based on literature. This paper is building upon my previous paper and therefore this
paper among other things consists of parts of my previous paper, to make this paper more
understandable for those who didn't read my previous paper, The semantic web as innovation
(based on interviews).

Introduction
With the rise of the internet our society shifted towards an information culture. All kinds of
information can be found on the internet; e-mail, news, entertainment, scientific articles,
vacancies, online shopping, social networking, name it and it's out there. We've got used to
the internet so much that we can't imagine our lives without it. And there seems to be no limit
to the internet; it's getting bigger, much bigger, every day. Thanks to this explosion of
information among other things, it is hard to find the right information in a short amount of
time. This is one of the reasons why the semantic web is being developed. By making the web
more semantic one can find this requested information faster and can be given extra
information that is relevant to the requested information. When information becomes
semantic to the computer, the information will be machine processable. Thanks to this fact,
applications can extract different data from various places and can combine it together so that
'new' information can be created. But rather than only focusing on the functions of the
semantic web, I want to look at the semantic web from an innovative perspective. The main
question in this article is: What does the innovation process of the semantic web look like?

To answer this question it is first of all important to understand the process of innovation in
general, which consists of four stages according to Basadur (2000). Next the paper shows the
content of these stages based upon articles that were written between present time and the
early days of the Semantic Web (2001-2010). Then I will compare these outcomes to the
findings of my previous paper, which had the same main question, to be able to get a good
insight into the innovation process of the Semantic Web. This will lead to the conclusion and
new insights of my research project.

The process of innovation

Innovation is one of the 'buzz-words' of the past decennia. One must innovate to achieve
success in our world. If we want to develop ourselves we must innovate. But what is actually
meant by innovation? According to Denning (2004) it is important to make a sharp distinction

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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 to
execute 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 to
make 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 process
of 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):

 Normally you'll get hundreds/thousands of hits with one search, though only a few
of them will be relevant to you.
 The results are highly sensitive to the vocabulary one has used. You might miss
some hits because you have used different words though meaning the same.
 The hits from our search are just single web pages. Often we need information that is
found 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. It’s 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
that’s 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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later. To be able to collect data fast from different places, links between the data, that are
written in RDF, have to be made. At the Linked Open Data project they are trying to create
those links. (Kobilarov, 2009) This data is available thanks to ontologies. An ontology is a
document that defines relations among terms. An ontology usually has a taxonomy and has a
set of inference rules.

"The taxonomy defines classes of objects and relations among them... Classes, subclasses and
relations among entities are a very powerfull tool for Web use. We can express a large
number of relations among entities by assigning properties to classes and allowing
subclasses to inherit such properties."(Berners-Lee, 2001, p. 3)

Ontologies are one of the core components of the Semantic Web. The ontologies will provide
the structure and meaning that make the data machine-accessible. Two main functions of
ontologies can be named: "They can be used in a simple fashion to improve accuracy of Web
searches - the search program can look for only those pages that refer to a precise concept
instead of all the ones using ambiguous keywords. More advanced applications will use
ontologies to relate the information on a page to the associated knowledge structures and
inference rules."(Berners-Lee, 2001, p. 3)

In order to make the Semantic Web work standards are necessary. People need to agree upon
what tools and techniques to use, else one would get different versions of the Web which can't
communicate with each other. "Usually there are several research groups moving in different
directions; this competition of ideas is a major driving force for scientific process. However,
from an engineering perspective there is a need to standardize. Once a standard has been
established, many more groups and companies will adopt it, instead of waiting to see which
of the alternative research lines will be successful in the end."(Antoniou, 2004, p. 17)

Figure 4. Layered approach Semantic Web (Antoniou, 2004, p. 19)

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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 at
http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/)

Implementing and accepting stage (4)

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.

People need to realize that it takes time for an invention to become an innovation. It isn't a
simple 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 cycle (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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" Provenance—that is, the when, where, and conditions under which data originated—has
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 cycle (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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Comparison interviews with literature
In this section I will compare the different stages of innovation based upon the interviews to
the different stages of innovation based upon the articles according to the figures that
represent the stages.

Generating stage

Figure 7. Generating stage based on articles

Figure 8. Generating stage based on interviews

In the generating stage the interviewees and the articles present pretty much the same
information: The semantic web is the symbiosis of the 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 of the WWW, started promoting this vision at the
end of de '90. Thereby the idea/concept of the Semantic Web was born.

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Conceptualizing and optimizing stage

Figure 9. Conceptualizing and optimizing stage based on articles

Figure 10. Conceptualizing and optimizing 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 Semantic
Web. 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 innovation
than 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 about the same subjects regarding to what the
future of the semantic web should bring - provenance of data, the computing problem and the
linked open data project - and regarding what the step after the semantic web would be - the
internet of thing/ an ubiquitous web. Apparently these are the R&D issues for the coming
years. The articles added two extra dimensions: how to handle the copyright inside the
Semantic Web and what we can expect of the fusion of the 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 Press.

Basadur, M., P. Pringle, 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 Paper).

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."

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d'Aquin, M., E. Motta, et al. (2008). "Toward a new generation of semantic web
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ACM 49(5): 52.

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

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Kobilarov, G., T. Scott, et al. (2009). "Media meets semantic web–how the BBC uses
DBpedia and linked data to make connections." The Semantic Web: Research and
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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
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Wielkens, S. (2010). "The Semantic Web as Innovation (based on interviews."

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