The Semantic Web: Challenges, Opportunities and Challenges

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The Semantic WebChallenges, Opportunitiesand
Challenges

• Norman M. Sadeh
• Carnegie Mellon University/European Commission

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Outline

• Semantic Web The Challenges
• A B2B Perspective
• An mCommerce Perspective
• OntoWeb A Program Managers Perspective

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Vision

• The Webs Paradox
• Power Massive amount of content
• Weakness Inability to harness all this content
• Vision Make Web content and services
  machine-understandable
• Support significantly higher levels of automation
• Agents and other intelligent technologies

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Syntactic Approaches Wont Do

• Domain-specific syntactic tags
• All parties have to agree upfront on a common
  terminology
• Makes it difficult to introduce new terms and
  concepts
• Or modify the meaning of some terms
• Doesnt necessarily guarantee that everyone has
  the exact same understanding of what each concept
  means

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Semantic Web

• So, lets use ontologies and semantic markup
• But
• How will we get people/organizations to annotate
  Web content?
• The old chicken egg problem
• Easy-to-use editing tools
• And how will we solve the many other technical
  problems that need to be addressed?
• e.g. ontology translation/equivalence, etc.

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The Opportunity is Right Now!

• Creating compelling services and functionality is
  the only way to bring industry onboard
• Government programs in the EU and the US have
  agreed to provide over / 100M in seed money
• The window of opportunity is shortperhaps 3 or 4
  years
• Focus on the easy pickings first!

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Some Promising Areas

• B2B Interoperability
• Mobile Internet Services
• and many more
• B2C, e.g.
• One-stop online travel services
• Customer protection online dispute resolution
• Medical domain

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The Emerging Internet Economy
Source Gartner March 2001 Includes sales of
all goods and services for which the order taking
process was completed via the internet - i.e.
excludes proprietary networks
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Dynamic Supply Chains
Functional Silos
Inventory Control
Purchasing
Production
Sales
Distribution
Manufacturing Management
Distribution
Customers
Materials Management
Suppliers
Enterprise Integration
Suppliers
Internal Supply Chain
Customers
Supply Chain Integration
e-Markets/Exchanges
Buyers/ Sellers
Buyers/ Sellers
Dynamic Internet-enabled Supply Chain
Buyers/ Sellers
Buyers/ Sellers
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Beyond Just Procurement

• All activities will increasingly be carried out
  across dynamic webs of companies
• Design, production, distribution, maintenance,
  etc.
• Inter-enterprise collaboration
• Dynamic partnerships
• Objective Always work with the best partner
• A companys competitiveness is determined by its
  ability to interoperate with others
• Semantic B2B interoperability

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Semantic B2B An Example
Car Seat Manufacturers
Electronics Manufacturers
Quote Sensor Design
Exchange
e-Service Center
Collaborative Design
Event Description
Collaborative Diagnosis
Specs Price Reqts.
Diagnosis of airbag that incidentally inflated
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Beyond Inter-Enterprise Collaboration

• Disaggregate large enterprise solutions
• e.g. large ERP solutions
• Towards interoperation of best-of-breed packages
• Both static dynamic models
• e.g. Dynamic ASP model based on semantic markup
• Potential Benefits
• Lower costs
• More competition You only buy what you need
• Best functionality
• Lower consulting fees?
• Integration, maintenance, etc.

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Dynamic B2B Interoperability

• Company services and products described with
  semantic annotations
• Services can be combined in an arbitrary fashion
  subject to semantic service descriptions
• e.g. Use Company Xs CAD tool, Company Ys
  manufacturing facility, Company Zs logistics
  system, etc.
• Companies advertise their services in directories
  and/or emarketplaces just like they advertise
  their products today

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Emerging Vision

• Semantic Markup
• Service Capability
• Rate

Supporting ASP
Supporting ASP
Market-driven Partnership
Core Business Partner
Core Business Partner
Supporting ASP
Core Business Partner
Supporting ASP
Supporting ASP
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Mobile Internet Services

• The emerging mobile internet
• Towards a billion mobile phone users
• Also PDAs, pagers, wearable computers, etc.
• Most devices to become internet-enabled within a
  few years
• More accurate location tracking functionality to
  become widespread

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Context Awareness

• Device limitations
• Time critical nature of many usage scenarios
• Require personalization context-awareness

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Challenges

• Capture user context while minimizing user input
• Match users context with available services
  (push and pull)
• Be useful rather than annoying
• Scale across a broad range of services
• interoperability
• Capture users permission/privacy requirements
• Including sharing of contextual information
• With whom, under which conditions, etc.
• User acceptance is the ultimate criterion

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Context-Aware Campus Services

• Motivation
• Campus as everyday life microcosm
• Objective
• Enhance campus life through context-aware
  services accessible over the WLAN
• Approach
• Involve stakeholders in the design (e.g.
  students)
• Exploit location, calendar and other sources of
  contextual information
• Develop evaluate ontologies, incl. permission
  and privacy models, matchmaking logic
• Evaluate overall acceptance extrapolate

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Carnegie Mellons Mobile Context-Aware Campus
Services
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Example A Calendar Ontology

• Taxonomy of Activities
• Attending class, studying, taking an exam,
  socializing, etc.
• Actors
• Self, classmates, teacher, etc.
• Permissions Default Preferences
• e.g. when in class, I dont like to be disrupted
  by promotional messages
• which can be selectively overridden by the user

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Agent-Based Matchmaking

• Matches users contexts and services
• Both push and pull scenarios
• Push scenarios subject to permission profile as
  defined in the users current context
• Pull Queries are customized based on the users
  current context

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OntoWeb A Program Managers Perspective

• Promote the Semantic Web
• Sell the Semantic Web by touting domain-specific
  benefits
• The Holy Grail sales pitch always fails
• e.g. AI in the 80s vs. AI in the 90s
• Key role of SIGs early demonstrators

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OntoWeb A Program Managers Perspective II

• Build critical mass
• International collaboration, e.g. DAML
• Leverage collaborate with other industrial
  efforts rather than pretend they dont exist
• W3C, WAP, UDDI, UCEC, ebXML, etc
• Be all inclusive
• Dont start religious warsyoull loose them

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OntoWeb A Program Managers Perspective III

• Help steer the research community towards the
  most promising research avenues
• Workshops, regularly updated roadmap(s),
  competitions, etc.
• Inform funding agencies on what the research
  priorities should be
• Adjust your expectations as you go
• If we manage to realize 25 of the Semantic Web
  vision, weve already won!

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