We recently attended a seminar on the legal challenges of the upcoming semantic web by Phillip Nolan and Liam  Ó Móráin.

We sensed that not all the attendees grasped the concept of what the semantic web will/may mean. Still, great challenging questions were posed to the speakers. To be honest, I was one of those but was in an advantageous position because of being a bit familiar with some logic and philosophical terms such as Ontology (geekish stuff anyways). If we look at the now popular term “web 2.0” was probably only understood by the majority of people as it started kicking in and not before , so the same could happen with the Semantic Web 3.0. The difference is that some acute angles of this phenomenon should really be noted by people and companies before they actually have breakfast with the phenomenon itself.

Looking at Web 3.0 as semantic (=meaning), implies information interconnected more intelligently, based on what we could simplify as the idea of folksonomy or “tagging” (but in a more automatic than what we are used to until now). This intelligence makes information more readily available to everyone and makes things relevant the information seeker.

Big players such as the BBC, BT, Yahoo and of course, Google are experimenting with these technology. But great results are not only for media players though: Even research labs, and pharmaceuticals are looking at gene pattern interpretation more intelligently.

But let’s recap on what the semantic web may mean to somebody that googles, emails, chats, or tweets everyday: Nowadays if you look for “apple” online you may find a picture of your favourite fruit or a picture of Steve jobs. This is based on the web now connecting documents (HTML pages) and not data (meaning). So in an ideal semantic web, search will be more intelligent and seamlessly interpret that “apple” within X context, conditions, identifiers, and resources will be about an apple and not about a bearded millionaire.

I’ll leave it to you to imagine what all the SEO agencies will do when working out titles, metatags and keyword density and link building stops doing the job. Probably the new job spec for an SEO person will have to do with semiotics?

So going to some of the challenges posed by the semantic web:

• Clever or dumb?: One of the key issues of a Web that presents the user with almost everything they look for is if we will create new generations of more impatient silly people and what may happen with our critical thinking capacities.
• Copyrights: In a web where almost everything is available to everyone, semantic technologies really have to be up to pace with copyright protection. Effectively this may consolidate a shift already occurring within this industry (e.g. Going forward you may be able to download a CD and share it with up to x amount of friends. The term friend will (beforehand) be defined by an ontology that differentiates it from a business partner, etc).
• Disclaimers: As websites and applications get more savvy, their eventual mistakes may have more weight for the users who trust them. Business owners will have to protect themselves from this, with powerful disclaimers (e.g. if you enter your details in a website that claims to intelligently find the perfect business partner from a database, you shouldn’t be able to blame them if things go wrong)
• Privacy and defamation: Who is responsible for such things in a “cleverly” interconnected web? Publishers, proprietors, developers? Maybe the user?

Most of the solutions to these challenges and protection come directly from the very semantic technology. That is reassuring, however, (following the same reasoning with a bit of  fantasy) I wonder if we could reach a stage in which the interpretation of law is carried out through  semantic technology itself!

Have a look at the presentation kindly uploaded to Slideshare by Philip Nolan

Hope this post gets you started and you can find more head-wrecking information on the semantic web here: http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Main_Page

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