Foreword
Some years back, Tim Berners-Lee opined that we would know that the semantic web was becoming a success when people stopped asking “why?” and started asking “how?”—the same way they did with the World Wide Web many years earlier. With this book, I finally feel comfortable saying we have turned that corner. This book is about the “how”—it provides the tools a programmer needs to get going now!
This book’s approach to the semantic web is well matched to the community that is most actively ready to start exploiting these new web technologies: programmers. More than a decade ago, researchers such as myself started playing with some of the ideas behind the semantic web, and from about 1999 to 2005, significant research funding went into the field. The “noise” from all those researchers sometimes obscured the fact that the practical technology spinning off of this research was not rocket science. In fact, that technology, which you will read about in this book, has been maturing extremely well, and it is now becoming an important component of the web developer’s toolkit.
In 2000 and 2001, articles about the semantic web started to appear in the memespace of the Web. Around 2005, we started to see not just small companies in the space, but some bigger players like Oracle embracing the technology. Late in 2006, John Markoff wrote a New York Times article referring to “Web 3.0,” and more developers started to take a serious look at the semantic web—and they liked what they saw. This developer community has helped create the tools and technologies so that, here in 2009, we’re starting to see a real take-off happening. Announcements of different uses of semantic web and related technologies are appearing on an almost daily basis.
Semantic web technologies are being used by the Obama administration to provide transparency to government data, a move also being explored by many other governments around the world. Google and Yahoo! now collect and process embedded RDFa from web documents, and Microsoft recently discussed some of its semantic efforts in language-based web applications. Web 3.0 applications are attracting the sorts of user numbers that brought the early Web 2.0 apps to public attention, while a bunch of innovative startups you may not have heard of yet are exploring how to bring semantic technologies into an ever-widening range of web applications.
With all this excitement, however, has come an obvious problem. There are now a lot more people asking “how?”, but since this technology is just coming into its own, there aren’t many people who know how to answer the question. Where the early semantic web evangelists like me have gotten pretty good at explaining the vision to a wide range of people, including database administrators, government employees, industrialists, and academics, the questions being asked lately have been harder and harder to address. When the CTO of a Fortune 500 company asks me why he should pay attention to the technology, I can’t wait to answer. However, when his developer asks me how best to find the appropriate objects for the predicates expressed in some embedded RDFa, or how the bindings of a BNode in the OPTIONAL clause of a SPARQL query work, I know that I’m soon going to be out of my depth. With the publication of this book, however, I can now point to it and say, “The answer’s in there.” The hole in the literature about how to make the semantic web work from the programmer’s viewpoint has finally been filled.
This book also addresses another important need. Given that the top of the semantic web “layer cake” (see Chapter 11) is still in the research world, there’s been a lot of confusion. On one hand, terms like “Linked Data” and “Web 3.0” are being used to describe the immediately applicable and rapidly expanding technology that is needed for web applications today. Meanwhile, people are also exploring the “semantic web 2.0” developments that will power the next generation. This book provides an easy way for the reader to tell the “practical now” from the pie in the sky.
Finally, I like this book for another reason: it embraces a philosophy I’ve often referred to as “a little Semantics goes a long way.”[1] On the Web, a developer doesn’t need to be a philosopher, an AI researcher, or a logician to understand how to make the semantic web work for him. However, figuring out just how much knowledge is enough to get going is a real challenge. In this book, Toby, Jamie, and Colin will show you “just enough RDF” (Chapter 4) and “just enough OWL” (Chapter 6) to allow you, the programmer, to get in there and start hacking.
In short, the technologies are here, the tools are ready, and this book will show you how to make it all work for you. So what are you waiting for? The future of the Web is at your fingertips.
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