Haugesund herring merchant with Shell Penguins FPSO behind.
Haugesund herring merchant with Shell Penguins FPSO behind.
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Back in the last millennium, Sir Tim Berners-Lee came up with what was to be the next big thing for the world-wide web (his invention), the ‘semantic web’. This was an attempt to transform the WWW from a collection of idiosyncratic pages into something more structured. As befits a pronouncement from the web’s guru in chief, the semweb got a lot of attention. Far more than it deserved in fact. TBL imagined a web where information items were all tagged such that they became machine readable. His original suggestion for the tagging mechanism was the resource description format (RDF). Immediately the IT world went mad, believing that RDF was going to make the web infinitely more useful. The flaw in this reasoning is that it was never the tagging mechanism that was going to change the world. What could have done this was a massive effort on the part of developers to make their web sites more accessible to machines (whether via RDF or another mechanism). Needless to say, this was a big ask. Website owners were more concerned with making cute stuff that allowed adverts to ‘pop up’ and pester folks. The flaw in TBLs semweb revolution was that website owners in general do not want their stuff ‘exposed’ to machine to machine communications. The idiosyncrasy of the WWW is a feature, not a bug!
On the shelves in my office I count ten books (remember them?) covering the semweb, ontologies and such, dating from the noughties. These often spoke enthusiastically of the semweb’s potential. The blurb from one book, ‘Spinning the Semantic Web*’ speaks of‘ an exciting new type of hierarchy and standardization that will replace the current web of links with a web of meaning. I think it is fair to say that this has not happened.
What did happen in the early years of the 21st century was that the semweb was taken on board by the research establishment (at least in Europe) in a big way. The workings of this may not be familiar to you. In other contexts, the generally accepted principle for the advancement of humanity is via a multiplicity of competing initiatives of which the best will thrive. This is not how things work in EU research where the politicos that decide what research to fund are constantly on the look out for the next big thing. Most recently this has been AI. Before that, albeit briefly, it was blockchain. And before blockchain it was the semantic web before that, business objects and so on. The EU then announces the direction that researchers will have to take to get funded. And off they go. It is a curious way of doing business. A multiplicity of institutions ‘compete’ for funding. But the competition is limited to what has previously been selected as ‘worthwhile’. The approach is more like the monolithic culture of the Soviet Union than Silicon Valley.
While the semweb has not by any stretch of the imagination fulfilled its original promise, its impact of EU research has been huge and lives on today. SEMIC 2023, the Semantic Interoperability Conference broke all records with some 458 on site visitors and 803 followers online. In Brussels recently, another semantic initiative saw the light of day, the TotalEnergies-backed Knowledge Graph Alliance (see elsewhere in this issue) is seeking to get the semantic ball rolling, echoing a much earlier failed attempt by the W3C to get the oil and gas industry to finance further semantic research.
At ECIM (and, we have it on good authority, in some EU Majors’ databases) we heard that naming stuff remains an issue, despite the problem having been ‘solved’ twenty years ago. Why is this? Why not have a ‘standard’ convention? Something along the lines of the KGA or a host of other proposals that have been made over the years (I expect OSDU has its own …. it should). But the existence of a standard way of writing a well name does not fix the problem. These problems stay with us because the standards focus on the container (a database format, an ontology or what have you) and not on the content.
You might be curious to know how the problem was solved twenty years ago. It was solved by having a look-up table of well names across the various databases. Petris Winds (later acquired by Halliburton) was one early example of a commercial implementation of such a system. This simple system just leaves on other problem to fix. That is making sure that the well name or whatever attribute you are concerned with is always the same in each database or application, now and for all future data entries. If you have a lot of legacy data, and a lot of new ‘big’ data, then this is a hard problem that involves the ‘management’ part of data management. Over the years I have seen companies shy away from these mundane issues (bad, missing data, wrong name, duplicates etc.) to focus on the more intellectually stimulating problems of standards and formats. Vendors don’t help. People who want to ‘move fast and break things’ don’t help. Managers who are blindsided by their IT/data folks don’t help. The issue of in-house vs. outsourced services plays a big role here, but that’s a whole other story (and editorial?).
* Spinning the Semantic Web, Dieter Fesnsl et al. MIT Press 2003 ISBN0-262-06232-1.
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