European Semantic Web Symposium 2004

Crete, Greece a great place for a conference. The week just passed by attending the first European semantic web conference at Heraklion. The place was wonderful, atmosphere was cool and the topic was great. The conference was well attended by around 200 plus people. My congratulations to all the people involved in the organization.

The talks were interesting, some of them stimulating but these are still scratching the surface. And this makes you realize a lot of work has yet to be done and some fundamental problems need to be solved. Semantic Web promises a lot and the road from the problem to the solution is quite fuzzy.

I myself would like this huge effort to succeed but as I started working into the field, I am getting to know the core problems which are as old as of the 80s. The application cases presented in the conference were interesting and did quite a lot but they are in my opinion mere use of RDF and related technologies. They don't justify how using semantic technologies helped as regards to implementing them in simple relational or object oriented technologies of today. And this I think is fundamental to the success of Semantic Web. And that's why I think industry is still keeping away from semantic technologies to a larger extent as of today.

One thing that I understood from the talk by Guus Schreiber, was the difference between ontologies and data models. Ontologies are meant to be fundamentally developed in a shared community. This is what gives ontology its meaning. If one is developing and using his own small ontology in OWL, its still a data model and not an ontology.

Most people have an intuition that semantic web technologies can work and some others are susceptical. Only time can tell which one succeeds. I am myself interested in how technology can be applied in real information systems and solve real life problems.

It will be great to see what the next semantic web conference presents. Its also in Heraklion !!!