I would summarize my experience at the 2nd US Semantics Technology Symposium as follows:
Frustrated but optimistic
First of all, I share my criticism with the upmost respect I have for everybody in this community. Furthermore, I acknowledge that this is my biased view based on the sessions and hallway conversations I had. Therefore, please take my comments with a grain of salt.
Frustration
Where is the excitement?
I left last year after the 1st US2TS very excited. It actually took me another week to process further the excitement. This year I simply didn’t feel the excitement. This was also echoed in the town hall meeting we had. I acknowledge that this is my feeling and it may not be shared by others. I was expecting to see people sharing their new research grants (per the previous year, there is a lot of NSF money), companies sharing what they are doing (there was a bit of this but not much), newcomers asking questions about how to bring semantic technologies into practice. All of this was missing. I think the community is stuck in the same ol’, same ol’.
Same ol’, Same ol’
A common theme I was hearing was the “Same ol’ same ol’”: we need better tools, we need to lower the barrier, it’s too hard to use, etc. … Insert here a phrase often used towards someone who states the obvious….
This was also my takeaway from Deborah McGuinness’ keynote
This was probably my main source of frustration. I’ve been in this community for over a decade and I’ve been hearing the same thing for a decade.
Where is the community?
Per the US2TS website “The goal of the U.S. Semantic Technologies Symposium series is to bring together the U.S. Semantic Web community and begin forming such a research network.” Given that this was the second edition, I was expecting that we would be seeing a community forming. I did not feel that this was happening. Again, this is just my personal perception and others may disagree.
I did meet a few newcomers, and based on private conversations, I had the impression, and they also confessed, that a lot of the discussions were way over their head. Are we being open to the new comers? Do they feel welcome? I don’t think so.
What is a Knowledge Graph?
I understand that we need to define our terms, in order to make sure that we are talking about the same thing. But we have to be careful and not end up going down a black hole:
All of this discussion was a reminder of the “drama” we went through in Dagstuhl on this same topic of defining what is a knowledge graph. As I mentioned in my Dagstuhl trip report:
Throughout the week, there was a philosophical and political discussion about the definition. Some academics wanted to come up with a precise definition. Others wanted it to be loose. Academics will inevitably come up with different (conflicting) definitions (they already have) but given that industry uptake of Knowledge Graphs is already taking place, we shouldn’t do anything that hinder the current industry uptake. For example, we don’t want people searching for “Knowledge Graphs” and finding a bunch of papers, problems, etc instead of real world solutions (this is what happened with Semantic Web). A definition should be open and inclusive. A definition I liked from Aidan Hogan and Antoine Zimmermann was “as a graph of data with the intention to encode knowledge”
Excerpt from Trip Report on Knowledge Graph Dagstuhl Seminar
I had the opportunity to provide “my definition” of knowledge graph and I did it in a controversial way
I find it funny/ironic that really smart academics are providing a definition for a marketing term that came up in a blogpost in 2012!
Optimistic
Now that I have shared my frustration, let me share my optimism.
It was confirmed over and over the semantic technologies do work in the real world. This was clearly exposed in Deborah’s and Helena’s keynote
We do have newcomers who bring in a complete different perspective.
The newcomers are bringing in lessons learned
This community is full of incredibly smart people.
What should the 3rd edition of US2TS look like?
We need to provide elements to help form a community:
- [UPDATE, idea after chatting with Anna Lisa Gentile] Given that there is a cap on attendees, in order to register, people should submit a position statement indicating 1) why they want to attend, 2) what they have to contribute and 3) what they expect to take away. This is what the W3C Workshop on Graph Data did and the conversations were very lively.
- How about organizing a barcamp, with user-generated content on the fly.
- Have a wall of ideas where people can post the topics they are interested.
- Speed dating so people can find others that have similar interest.
We need more industry
- I think we should strive to have 50/50 between Industry and Academia (I think it was 60% academia this time) .
- Industry participants should have sessions explaining their pain points.
- Startup can share their latest developments and the help they may need.
We need an academic curriculum
- If we already have a group of academics in the room, why not spend some time organizing an undergrad and post-grad curriculum for semantic technologies that can be shared.
Even though I left frustrated, I’m optimistic that next year we can have an exciting event.
Final Notes
- The event was very well organized. Kudos to all the organizers!
- Duke University is very beautiful and the room we were in was very bright.
- Should this event be rebranded to Knowledge Graphs?
- Chris Mungall wrote a report
- Folks appreciated my call for knowing our history
I’d love to collaborate on curricula, since I currently teach two courses that involve semantic technologies. There has been a bit of interest in curriculum development also through AMIA’s Knowledge Representation and Semantics group. Interested folks should get ahold of me.