Will We Convey the Meaning of Semantics?

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Check out this post if you are interested in market adoption issues: it is entitled The Gap between the Web 2.0 and Semantic Web Community (tentative post), on a blog aptly called the Semantic Puzzle. I just commented on it, as I found interesting how Jana Herwig denounces the tendencies of semweb techies to use jargon (a topic I had also contributed to during the last semantic web gang podcast).

But Jana, I'm with you: it's perplexing to see semantics specialists having such a hard time to make themselves understood!

In my opinion, it is inevitable that semweb pioneers use a vocabulary that seems overly complex to the next wave of adopters. Why? Because anyone involved in the creation of a new technology has incentives to create a new vocabulary to define their inventions. And once they've done it, they have a disincentive to simplify that language for the next wave of adopters.

C'mon people, why would they want to have to dumb things down? They've come up with the vocabulary, they now master it, and this language perfectly describes the vision of the world these pioneers uphold! On top, it ties these early inventors together in a fraternity, a tribe, as any social theory would tell you.

Sure, for the vision to be realized, this second generation of adopters --or third one, depending on which innovation diffusion model you use--  must embrace the concepts developed by the first generation (or first and second...). But doing this also guarantees a loss of power for a majority of the pioneers, whose ideas will be seized by new hordes of self-centric, consuming barbarians. What are you waiting for, hold the gates!

Now, extending innovation diffusion theory a little, we can expect that, sooner or later, these hordes will manage to take the fortress held by the original semweb priests, realize that RDF, SPARQL and other OWL is Latin for much simpler ideas, and explain that to even larger hordes into their plain Middle-Earth languages. It's likely there will be losses in translation. But the alternative is to have them burn down the Library of Alexandria.

Ok, I'm mixing mythologies here, but you get the point, don't you? Well, that's exactly what simplifying semantics is about.

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