Programming the Semantic Web

Chapter 11. The Giant Global Graph

Hopefully, over the course of this book we have demonstrated the power of semantic programming and convinced you of how easy it is to incorporate semantic technologies into your own architectures. Our ability to concisely introduce semantic technologies has been facilitated by a lot of existing research on building the semantic web over the past decade. And that existing work rests on more than a quarter century of research on language understanding and knowledge representation.

Today’s semantic technologies are the result of threshing many lines of academic research that deal with a wide variety of thorny issues, and harvesting, milling, and packaging the most useful and practical solutions. This sifted and codified experience gives you a standard, flexible approach to data integration and information management whether you are writing a Ruby on Rails “mash-up” or an Enterprise Java industrial solution.

Research into semantic technology continues to this day. Many academic labs are actively pursuing various open questions of knowledge representation. However, this ongoing research doesn’t mean the existing methods aren’t ready for adoption. To the contrary, it means that your investment in semantic technology today is backed with continuing support. What you learn today will prepare you for the continuous and incremental deliveries emerging from this vibrant area of work. That said, it is important to sort out what is useful today from what may ...