Connected Knowledge

Book Review: 
Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business

David Siegel
Portfolio Hardcover, 2010
ISBN-10: 1591842778, ISBM-13: 978-1591842774

As one of those people still bitter that personal jet-packs have yet to materialize, I am always a bit skeptical of breathless depictions of the future.  David Siegel’s new book, Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business definitely falls into this category, but in this case his predictions are likely to come true.  In fact, as he repeatedly asserts, many of them already have.  Ironically, much of my cynicism about rosy-eyed predictions of the World of Tomorrow is rooted in the promise of the Semantic Web as first articulated by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila in a 2001 article in Scientific American.  In that article Lee and his W3C compatriots painted the future of the web as “an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users.”  This vision has never really materialized, but to a large degree  the semantic web has.  It is just emerging in a different form and with a different emphasis.  Rather than focusing on autonomous software-agents just shy of becoming self-aware, the semantic web is all about linked-data.

Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn’t previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods. More specifically, Wikipedia defines Linked Data as "a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF."

–linkeddata.org

This is the manifestation of the Semantic Web Siegel is so excited about.   He takes a broad definition of the Semantic Web focusing mainly on the importance of shared metadata (ontologies aren’t discussed in any depth until chapter 12) and illustrates with business applications, both current and potential. Each chapter enthuses about the possibilities inherent in ubiquitous, structured and meaningfully tagged information.  His prose is often a bit too evangelical for my taste. You often come across sentences like, “As you learn about new game changing technologies, keep looking for the management mind shift you’ll need to go bravely into the world of pull.” And his scenarios often have a gee-whiz flavor similar to the agent-oriented predictions of Berners-Lee’s decade old vision.

In the semantic future, information lives online, waiting to be pulled through your device-mesh.  If you’re watching a movie at home and have to go to the airport, you’ll log into the display in the waiting lounge or on the airplane, and the movie will automatically continue where you left off. Your music or favorite news station will start playing as soon as you get into your rental car, you’ve logged into your personal data locker and now the rental car (including mirror and seat adjustments) is tuned to your personal ontology.  In fact, all your preferences will live online, and your preferences will replace many of the products you own today.

The notion of a “personal data locker” is a good example of how Siegel’s exuberance is actually pretty well grounded.  Though he doesn’t discuss it explicitly, Personal Health Records such as Microsoft’s HealthVault and Google Health are already in place with much of the functionality Siegel predicts.  (see my post from last year on Personal Health Records) In some cases, Siegel gets things wrong, as with his discussion of the Health Insurance Privacy and Accountability Act (HIPAA) but overall he does an excellent job of presenting the current state and direction of these technologies.  Just as important, he connects them to concrete business problems without jargon that may intimidate (or bore) non-technical readers. 

Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business is what I usually classify as an airplane read; a nice business-related title that can be read easily on a flight from Portland to New York.  It is written at the level of a Discovery Channel documentary and is quite engaging.  Imagine someone at a cocktail party, (after maybe one glass of wine more than is strictly prudent)  explaining to an intelligent but not technologically savvy guest what the semantic web is and why it matters.  This book is not going to give you the depth of information available in other titles such as Allemang and Hendler’s excellent Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, but it is not intended to.  The vast majority of business readers do not need, nor want, to know the nitty-gritty details of OWL, RDFS and SPARQL.  They do need to know how semantic technologies as a whole are shaping the web and business in an information intensive world.  In that context, Siegel’s book succeeds admirably.