As Paul Miller notes, “the Cloud” is increasingly prevalent in tech conversation these days. As if “cloud computing” weren’t a fuzzy enough term, now we have the “data cloud” which, if I understand Paul correctly, may just be a rebranding of the “semantic web” (itself a bit fuzzy for my tastes). Although it’s not clear to me from the article to what extent the “data cloud” represents a commodified data repository vs. a common framework to link everyone’s data using open standards.
I suppose I’ve been in technology long enough that I shouldn’t be making fun of buzzwords, especially when the movement to the cloud represents a real and positive phenomenon. But the semantic web needs more than rebranding. A quick search turned up this post from last year that lists what Nova Spivack identified as barriers to the adoption of the semantic web:
- A lack of tools
- Scaling challenges (what if you want to store a trillion+ triples?)
- Vision issues (how can we define a practical vision, for the low-hanging fruit?)
- Inadequate Content (not enough semantic data available)
- No killer apps
- Market education
One year later, I’m not sure we’re that much farther along.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Paul Miller // Oct 7, 2008 at 2:03 pm
“Although it’s not clear to me from the article to what extent the “data cloud” represents a commodified data repository vs. a common framework to link everyone’s data using open standards.”
Definitely the latter. Still, clearly not my most popular idea ever…
I would argue (although maybe not in a comment) that ‘we’ have come a long way since Nova’s post, though. I think he’d agree, too…
2 Daniel Tunkelang // Oct 7, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Fair enough, I should give the semantic web community more credit. Still: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web#Skeptical_reactions
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