Tom Tague

Massachusetts, U.S.A.

Calais Initiative Lead

Tim:

Tom Tague from the Thomson Reuters Calais initiative here.

For the most part I’d like to second your opinions on the transformation of the Semantic web from the world of invention to the world of innovation. At Calais we are witnessing first hand an explosion of interest in applying these technologies to real world issues. As a simple evidence point – over 5,000 developers have registered to use the Calais service in the last six months resulting in dozens of interesting and innovative applications.

But – I’d like to challenge you and your readers to think well beyond search as the end target for semantic capabilities. While search has served us well for the last decade as a tool for gaining access to an exploding content ecosystem – it is rapidly becoming apparent that search is perhaps not the best tool for actually integrating and using the wealth of content assets becoming available. In short – users want to do more than simply find things – they want those things to work together to provide answers, functionality and results. This, at heart, is what the Semantic web is about.

The next 12-24 months should be interesting. We’re in the midst of seeing the classic expectations mismatch that occurs when a sophisticated technology starts to become visible to real world users. We technologists are happy the technology works at all – and users are unhappy because it doesn’t meet the hyped up expectations that have been fed to them. Our challenge as technology innovators is to bridge that gap.