The Semantic Web is not Restricted to Ontologies!

The semantic web is a nice strand. Something where AI should be able to do a huge job based on the massive knowledge spread around the web. Is it about AI or more generally machine processabiity? The last call for paper for the WWW conference actually broadened the semantic web track call to “Semantic / Data Web”.

Surfing on this we submitted about copy-and-paste of formulæ within browsers and it got rejected. Don’t take me wrong, I certainly don’t like to rant on paper rejection neither require reconsideration of the review of our paper. Nonetheless, I wanted to make public that fully bloated first paragraph of the review which reflects a widespread disease:

This paper is not relevant to the Semantic Web track. It uses the term semantics to separate content from presentation. However, there are no ontologies or other explicit semantics involved. The system uses the OpenMath language, which is ordinary XML and thus only has implicit semantics. Any use of these semantics by the application is built-in and not flexible, making it no different from any other web application.

This really means that while the editors that have written the call-for-paper may share that this track is about interoperability for the web, the reviewers still stand on that old statement “the semantic web is only about ontologies”.

Who ever has said that the semantic web is only about ontologies?

• the dictionary? By no means. The OpenMath format really qualifies as being semantic according to the dictionary since it does strive for meaning (a lot more than many ontologies do!). Even Wikipedia’s Semantic entry seems to only quote the usage of ontologies as an example.
• the vision papers? No, I don’t think so. At least not the paper of Hendler-Berners-Lee-Miller.
• … who then? I’m left to agree with several friends… many in the semantic-web community form a community of powers with some “nombrilistes” views.

Ontologies are a very useful formalism and their development in the semantic web W3C groups is honourable (we are using some of that) but excluding a research strand from the semantic web based on the lack of ontology is simply biassed. This is by far not the first time we hear such claims but it would be helpful that it is either defended or finally made mute!