Charles Ivie: The Rousing Success of the Semantic Web “Failure” – Episode 31

Knowledge Graph Insights

Charles Ivie Since the semantic web was introduced almost 25 years ago, many have dismissed it as a failure. Charles Ivie shows that the RDF standard and the knowledge-representation technology built on it have actually been quite successful. More than half of the world's web pages now share semantic annotations and the widespread adoption of knowledge graphs in enterprises and media companies is only growing as enterprise AI architectures mature. We talked about: his long work history in the knowledge graph world his observation that the semantic web is "the most catastrophically successful thing which people have called a failure" some of the measures of the success of the semantic web: ubiquitous RDF annotations in web pages, numerous knowledge graph deployments in big enterprises and media companies, etc. the long history of knowledge representation the role of RDF as a Rosetta Stone between human knowledge and computing capabilities how the abstraction that RDF permits helps connect different views of knowledge within a domain the need to scope any ontology in a specific domain the role of upper ontologies his transition from computer science and software engineering to semantic web technologies the fundamental role of knowledge representation tech - to help humans communicate information, to innovate, and to solve problems how semantic modeling's focus on humans working things out leads to better solutions than tech-driven approaches his desire to start a conversation around the fundamental upper principles of ontology design and semantic modeling, and his hypothesis that it might look something like a network of taxonomies Charles' bio Charles Ivie is a Senior Graph Architect with the Amazon Neptune team at Amazon Web Services (AWS). With over 15 years of experience in the knowledge graph community, he has been instrumental in designing, leading, and implementing graph solutions across various industries. Connect with Charles online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/1ANaFs-4hE4 Podcast intro transcript This is the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast, episode number 31. Since the concept of the semantic web was introduced almost 25 years ago, many have dismissed it as a failure. Charles Ivie points out that it's actually been a rousing success. From the ubiquitous presence of RDF annotations in web pages to the mass adoption of knowledge graphs in enterprises and media companies, the semantic web has been here all along and only continues to grow as more companies discover the benefits of knowledge-representation technology. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 31 of the Knowledge Graph Insights Podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show Charles Ivie. Charles is currently a senior graph architect at Amazon's Neptune department. He's been in the graph community for years, worked at the BBC, ran his own consultancies, worked at places like The Telegraph and The Financial Times and places you've heard of. So welcome Charles. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Charles: Sure. Thanks. Thanks, Larry. Very grateful to be invited on, so thank you for that. And what have I been up to? Yeah, I've been about in the graph industry for about 14 years or something like that now. And these days I am working with the Amazon Neptune team doing everything I can to help people become more successful with their graph implementations and with their projects. And I like to talk at conferences and join things like this and write as much as I can. And occasionally they let me loose on some code too. So that's kind of what I'm up to these days. Larry: Nice. Because you have a background as a software engineer and we will talk more about that later because I think that's really relevant to a lot of what we'll talk about. But the reason I wanted to have you on, I caught a video, we met somewhere recently, but anyhow, I was watching a video with the OriginTrail folks, and you made this great quote in there. Somebody asked about the Semantic Web and just kind of offhandedly dismissed it like people always do when they talk about it. And you said, "Yeah, but that's the most catastrophically successful thing which people have called a failure." Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Charles: Yes. I think what it really boils down to with that is what ... Well, how do you classify success or failure? These are actually very incredibly abstract terms. And what I was referring to originally was a bit of data, a statistic that over 50% of web pages that exist contain RDF. And what does that mean? That means that there are statements that are written in RDF syntax in over half web pages. And that didn't sound particularly unsuccessful to me, and I'd struggled with these kind of statements in my mind for a while, such as why is RDF a failure? You hear this kind of thing go around. And I thought it didn't really feel like it to me, it never really felt like it was particularly a failure. I mean, I built two businesses from it and they weren't failures and we represented an awful lot of knowledge in that time and it felt like that knowledge was represented. So yeah, how do you quantify successful failure? Who's taking the measurements and who's making that argument has a lot to do with that. Larry: And the other thing that I shared that ... I was doing a presentation shortly after I saw that talk, and I grabbed that stat because I think a year ago or something, Tony Seale pointed out to something like 40 some percent of websites had RDF annotations at that point. And I was like, wow. So it's still growing too. So there's that sort of growth of it. But immediately I followed that with a slide, which I noticed when I went back and watched another presentation of yours that you had done a similar slide where you just kind of list the enterprises that have done stuff with RDF, like RDF graphs, like your slide listed Facebook and Amazon and Uber and Siemens and Google. And I had included in mine, like LinkedIn's economic graph and Netflix's graph and JPMorganChase and Credit Suisse and Bloomberg and all these others. So it feels like a pretty successful effort in that regard too. Charles: Yeah, exactly. In many ways it's those with the deepest pockets that have benefited the most from the technologies, which is a statement which you hear from time to time in the modern world, of course. That's not that surprising. It's those who can dedicate their time on maybe understanding a larger data landscape, seeing the value of it and joining it all together and representing it properly. Is it really any surprise that they're the ones that have got the most value out of it? No, it's not, basically. Yeah, I mean- Larry: Well, they have both the problem and the means to implement a solution. That's kind of the idea. Charles: Yeah. Right. Exactly. And if they find that they don't like whatever tooling they find that can support what they're doing, they have the capability to build things themselves or join things together and buy things that maybe others couldn't afford and this sort of thing. So especially in the early days when things are very much cutting edge and new technology sets, you don't necessarily have big swaths of open source technology stacks available to you and stuff like that. These things are growing all the time, of course. But if we are speaking about it from a success is count metric of implementation nodes sense, then those things will have a big bearing on that. But I'm not even necessarily sure that that's the right metric to quantify success for. Larry: Because we were talking before we went on the air too, about what is the right metric because you said that, okay, which portion of the data in the world is represented as RDF in a graph someplace. That's pretty low. It's still mostly in SQL databases, but if the criterion was like, how do we understand all that data, you can make a case for RDF. Is that right? Charles: Yeah, I think that's a very good point. I don't even think we necessarily talked about it in exactly the way that we're about to talk about it, I think. But you are right. I mean, okay, so if what we are going to say is that the success of this is measured on how much data do we understand, that could be understood with no previous understanding apart from how to follow ontological models, then RDF is a massive success because this is the only one that really works. So on that very metric, all the others have a kind of success rate of zero to a certain extent because there was never really any overriding standardized ontological modeling concept which filtered down into it. Charles: Now, you could argue that maybe for example, entity relationship diagrams tried to replicate that sort of thing. So creating conceptual things which are related to other conceptual things, but they were always really created in a form that was supposed to be implemented into maybe a relational database or something like that. They tended to be bound to technology to a certain extent. So if that was an interesting metric, then maybe RDF is vastly successful because it could represent stuff in a way that's really well understood immediately. Yeah. Larry: The way you just said that too reminds me that the notion of a technology being bound to the success. You could even argue that RDF just happens to be a thing that works now, but that's not necessarily the only way you could represent knowledge. Have you given much thought to other ways or why RDF is successful in that regard? Charles: Yeah, sure. We've been recording knowledge for a very, very long time. And I mean that as in we as in people. First of all, people were recording knowledge by basically telling stories to one another and saying things,