I've always been of the opinion that concise value proposition
articulation shouldn't be the achilles of the Semantic Web. As the Linked Data wave climbs up the "value
Appreciation and Comprehension chain", it's getting clearer by the
second that "Context" is a point of confluence for
Semantic Web Technologies and easy to
comprehend value, from the perspectives of those outside the core
community.
In today's primarily Document centric Web, the pursuit
of Context is akin to pursuing a mirage in a
desert of user generated content. The quest is labor intensive, and
you ultimaely end up without water at the end of the pursuit
:-)
Listening to the Christine Connor's podcast interview with
Talis simply reinforces my strong belief that "Context, Context, Context" is the Semantic Web's equivalent of Real Estate's
"Location, Location, Location" (ignore the subprime loans mess for now). The critical
thing to note is that you cannot unravel "Context" from existing
Web content without incorporating powerful disambiguation
technology into an "Entity Extraction" process. Of course, you
cannot even consider seriously pursing any entity extraction and disambiguation endeavor
without a lookup backbone that exposes "Named Entities" and their relationships to
"Subject matter Concepts" (BTW - this is what
UMBEL is
all about). Thus, when looking at the broad subject of the Semantic Web, we can
also look at "Context" as the vital point of confluence for the
Data oriented (Linked Data) and the "Linguistic Meaning"
oriented perspectives.
I am even inclined to state publicly that "Context" may
ultimately be the foundation for 4th "Web Interaction Dimension" where
practical use of AI leverages a Linked Data Web substrate en route to exposing new kinds
of value :-)
"Context" may also be the focal point of concise value
proposition articulation to VCs as in: "My solution offers the ability to
discover and exploit "Context" iteratively, at the rate of $X.XX
per iteration, across a variety of market segments :-)