Bernard Lunn of ReadWriteWeb has a post on 11 Things To Know About Semantic Web. I found his list to be both reasonable and interesting, with some of the 11 more speculative than most. For example,

“Semantic Web will start the long, slow decline of relational database technology. Web 3.0 enables the transition from “structure upfront” to “structure on the fly”. The world is clearly too complex to structure upfront, despite the tremendous skills brought by data modelers. Structure on the fly is done by people adding structure as they use the service and by engines that automatically create structure from unstructured content. Structure on the fly is very, very hard and RDBMS is very, very entrenched so this will be a long and slow transition; but the decline is inevitable. Innovation has slowed in the RDBMS world - with open source at one end and Oracle at the other, there is little reason to innovate - just when Semantic Web innovation is accelerating. RDBMS was good for enterprise scale performance and reliability but for Internet scale it falls short; just look at what companies like Amazon use.”

I agree with this to some degree, but I expect RDBMSs to continue to dominate information systems while I still walk the earth. Well, maybe that’s what he had in mind by a slow decline.

Here’s the item I found most amusing.

“3. If you have a firm grasp of the theoretical underpinnings of the semantic web, things like RDF, tuples, Sparql and OWL that make my brain hurt, you will be able to charge a fat premium in consulting fees for a while, as not many people really understand this stuff. But make hay while the sun shines, as some entrepreneur will surely figure out how to abstract this stuff and make it accessible for the masses.”

How true. In ten years the Video Professor will be hawking Semantic Web lectures on late night TV.

I’m working on my own N things list, but it will cover a more fundamental subject.

Categories: Semantic Web, Web, , Related posts: • The Semantic Web for noobs;  • Blogjects: Blogging pigeons and rain forests;  • The Semantic Web floats in the memepool;   Trackback: link, Comments: