Biggest challenges for creating semantic web

(Non-)adoption of one universal standard

One of the main problems with semantic web is the fact that standards are not developed enough.

We currently have a problem of next generation HTML being either XHTML2.0 or HTML5 (or both!), which would lead to a more technologically disparate user interface implementations across the web.

In very short period of time from now we may have interfaces written in HTML4.01, HTML5, XHTML1.0 (Loose, Transitional and Strict) and XHTML2.0.

This is already enough ’stew’ of code, which is going to be very difficult for browsers to render.

It’s a common case today to be coding up a contact page, written in standards compliant XHTML1.0 Strict, which needs to include a Google Map, which is written in non-standards compliant HTML4.01.

The end result is a mish-mash solution which really makes no sense in terms of standards and long term validity.

Machine readability

The aim of the systems is to automate the mundane tasks.

This can only be achieved by using data structures which are easily machine readable and which developers can easily utilise to make them machine readable.

Automation of mundane tasks challenge is no longer about generating reports from a database once a month, but working out complex connections between people, phrases, terms, web pages and so on.

The systems which automate these tasks successfully (like Google and FaceBook) usually end up being very successful, highly used and profitable.

They are also incredibly scalable and very useful for the end user – imagine for example what the whole web experience would be like if Google did not exist.

Human readability

Human readibility is equally important as standards really ought to be usable by every day, non-technical individuals.

This is one of the main reasons why HTML has become so incredibly popular and therefore the whole concept of Internet has taken off to such a great extent.

With emergence of many, different standards this readability and learnability of implemented user interface solutions becomes much smaller and therefore it essentially stifles further development of Internet.

Emerging versions of technologies and standards are increasingly running into problems of human non-readibility and lower usability with each iteration.

More standards exist, the less integrated semantic web becomes and more there is for developers to learn.

If an average developer needs to know for example: 3 CSSs, PHP, XHTML, HTML5, MySQL, CSS and JavaScript with JQuery AJAX in order to implement a modern User Interface, it is clear and obvious that there are going to be fewer peoplle developing innovative solutions compared to when there was only HTML and CSS to worry about.

Standards authorities

There are a number of problems regarding the standards authorities on the web.

Generally speaking, standards authorities fall into the following groups:

1. Socialists: Human usability proponents who are usually not highly technical or not technical at all
2. Developers: Machine readbility proponents who are usually very technical, but have little or no considerations for usability and user interaction needs and requirements
3. Corporations: Large corporations, who inevitably want to create ’standards’ which only benefit their bottom lines (i.e. Apple, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM, etc.)

Each one of these groups have an important role to play in development of future and current standards, but in practice they do not collaborate enough, hence the standards tend to edge towards the benefit of one of those groups only and not everyone.

The above groups have the following impact on standards development:

1. Socialists: Promote best end user experience and most collaborative and easy to use solutions
2. Developers: Promote easiest and most flexible technologies to work with which offer viable solutions to solving complex problems of all sorts
3. Corporations: Impose standars by deploying them across their massive platforms (i.e. FaceBook’s 200M users is a good start towards deploying any standard on the web)

The only way proper standards can be achieved is by all groups collaborating together constantly in order to achieve standards, while in practice this does not happen nowhere near as enough as it should be.

The end result is more ‘broken’ than ‘fixed’ web, with group of people developing for different platforms, depending on what they have decided to support and most of the time never really supporting everything that should be supported.

Written by Jason Grant on 13th April 2009

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