While introducing the semantic web idea to an audience that has never heard of it, it’s best to focus on a couple core concepts and then incrementally communicate the idea through dialogue and discussion.
This is the approach that I have adopted at events like barcamps and devcamps.Here is the quick ten slide presentation which I have used to kick off the sessions.
In the early 90’s, when I was a still in college, I remember reading a interview by Louis Gerstner, then chief of IBM. When asked about how he saw the opportunity landscape for IBM, he spoke of the extent of content and data in the world that was still in analog form, and how each of these instances represented a huge opportunity for a computing company.
What was interesting was that everything that was analog was being seen as a potencial opportunity. Its not often that you can take one single transformative principle, apply it across the landscape of human activity and then go on to effectively reinvent how its all done. An entrepreneur just has to draw up a huge matrix and start ticking off the boxes which represent the most value!
If you look back, one can see three such universal transformative principles that are having a big impact on the world that we live in.
1. Analog to Digital data : The one that Gertsner spoke about. Note that it is not just about transfering data from ledgers into financial accounting apps but includes everything - communications, media distribution, paper money, legal documents … the whole lot.
2. Offline to Online data : This is the one that has occupied us over the last decade – all content available for anyone/anytime/anywhere on any device. Every single domain that made the leap from analog to digital was ready to now make this leap.
3. Disjoint to Linked data : This is the one that we are just getting started on – turning all content in the world into one unified database. Personal, enterprise and web data is simply differentiated by a set privacy attributes!
As you might have guessed from the name of my company, our focus is on the third transformation – going from disjoint pools of data to a linked ocean of data.
After a very long blogging hiatus, I thought it was time to make a fresh start. Henceforth, this blog will focus primarily on the work of my company, OneBigWeb. You could check out the new website!
Check back for more over the next few days!
ps: I have removed most of the past posts from this blog. I have however maintained a small selection - you can access them through the sidebar.
