Seven Arguments for Semantic Technologies

By Mike Bergman A popular post on this blog has been the Seven Pillars of the Open Semantic Enterprise. That article described the building blocks – or foundations – to a semantic enterprise, at least from my own perspective. But it has always felt that the reason why anyone should even be interested in this semantic enterprise business deserved its own discussion. This current article riffs off of that earlier blog to provide the seven rationales or arguments for why pursuing a semantic enterprise makes sense, especially in contrast to conventional or traditional approaches. This riff extends to even re-presenting the seven-spoke wheel from that original article: Each of these bubbles deserves some discussion. Search & Discover The first advantage with semantic technologies is that all kinds of information is unified. No matter what information you consider, any content type may become a ‘first-class citizen’. For really the first time, all kinds of information ranging from traditional databases and spreadsheets (“structured”), to markup, Web pages, XML and data messages (“semi-structured”), and then on to documents and text (“unstructured”) or multimedia (via metadata) can be put on a level playing field [1]. These data, now all treated on an equal footing, can be searched and retrieved by a variety of techniques. These range from SQL, standard text search, or SPARQL, depending on content type. This unique combination enables all of the aspects of findability – find, discover, navigate – to be fulfilled. Because of the diversity of search options available, search results can be varied and “dialed in” depending upon circumstance and needs. Because all content is represented either as a type of thing (“node” or noun) or the relationships between those things (“predicate”, “property”, “attribute” or characteristic or verb), any and all of those classifiers may be used for faceting or grouping. Further, the relationships put all things in context, useful to ensure results are relevant and disambiguated. In all cases, these ways of describing things and their relationships to one another are based on the “idea of the thing” and are not bound or restricted to keywords. This means that all the various ways that things can be described – alternative terms, synonyms, acronyms or jargon – including in multiple languages, can be used to find or match these ideas or concepts. When combined with the ability to infer relationships between things – even if not explicitly asserted – search and discovery for semantic technologies literally blows away any and all alternative approaches to search. Do More The classic information architecture (IA) diagram relates users to content and context. It is at the nexus of these ideas that actions and actionable information occurs: Semantic technologies are superior in terms of the ability to capture all forms of content (structured, semi-structured and unstructured) as first-class citizens and to represent it through knowledge graphs (ontologies). Further, the ability to describe this content with multiple labels, languages and descriptors means the “idea of things” is much better captured than via keywords alone. Continues @ Seven Arguments for Semantic Technologies  Related articles The Primacy of Search in the Semantic Enterprise Linked Data: Connecting together the BBC’s Online Content Meet The Metadata Governance Challenge On platforms and sharing: Machines filter. It takes a human to curate Emotion, Archives, Interactive Fiction, and Linked Data