Semantic Web: It´s all about “Relationship Discovery”

Since about 5 years or so, I have been constantly explaining to a variety of people with different backgrounds what the semantic web is all about. Sure, it´s about knowledge representation, ontology engineering, OWL, RDF and all that stuff. But, what´s the big deal? What´s the advantage of using all those technologies? I´ve been trying out many different explanations for these questions. Sometimes I had a few spare hours to address these issues in depth, sometimes I had only 5 minutes left to make my point. Finally, I think that I have distilled the focal idea of the semantic web: It´s all about relationship discovery!

One small example: Whenever I found an interesting site I was wondering if similar websites would exist. And here is a possible solution: similicious.

Since I like this site I have tried to find similar ones like this.

And just a few clicks away, I found this blog entry about a new breed of recommendation engines which “understand” their user´s needs better than ever before.

So in the future, whenever you will be asked what the semantic web is all about, you can – if you like – give a short answer nearly everybody will understand: “The Semantic Web is about finding interesting relations between all kinds of “things”: Who knows who? Who knows what? What´s similar like this? And even: What´s NOT similar like this but also somehow related? etc. – , that´s it.