Digesting last week's WWW2004 conference, I think I've come to two conclusions. The first conclusion is that the semantic web as envisioned at the W3C (RDF, OWL, URIs) is hype. Nobody is actually using it to accomplish anything useful. It's of great interest to theoreticians but has little to no practical impact, and is not likely to have any for the foreseeable future. I watched a lot of semantic web presentations over four days and they basically divided into two broad types:
Discussions of how to search, infer, query, store, manipulate or otherwise process RDF; without actually showing any practical; applications.
Case studies that sounded good and useful, and indeed were. However, when I actually googled my way into the projects' web sites and looked at the code, the projects proved to be using little to no semantic web technology. A few had rdf:about attributes stuck somewhere in a mass of plain XML. Some didn't even have that. Any semantics these applications had was based purely on element names and namespace URIs. RDF tuples were an afterthought, if indeed they were present at all.
Someone suggested during the lunch discussions at the end of the conference that XML was over; that the XML track had the least attendance and least interest from the attendees. The latter point may be true. The conference was full of academics who've hitched their wagons to the semantic web ox; and most XML focussed academics go to the IDEAlliance conferences instead of the W3C ones, so the audience in New York was both positively selected for the semantic web and negatively selected for XML. However, I saw no evidence that XML was over. When one looked a little deeper than the paper title, it was pretty obvious that applications were being built on top of XML, and that the semantic web helped little to none. XML may not sound as sexy as the semantic web, but it's infinitely more useful for getting the job done.
What's the second thing I noticed? Well, there was one technology shown at the conference that did sneak up on me, that I haven't paid much attention to in the past, and that I'm now convinced is going to be a critical part of application development in the near future. This could well be the next big thing with an exponential growth curve that matches past stars like Java, XML, HTML, and Linux and with similarly disruptive effects on the development ecosystem. More on that subject tomorrow.
The
W3C has released version 8.5 of
Amaya, their open source testbed web browser
and authoring tool for Solaris, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X
that supports
HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, XHTML Basic, XHTML 1.1, HTTP 1.1, MathML 2.0, SVG, and
much of CSS 2 . This release fixes assorted bugs.