Health Warning:

This is going to be a pretentious talk

Philosophical confessioncoming up:

What I believe about scientific knowledge

Laws about the information universe,

just like laws about the physical universe

alchemy

Did a decade of Semantic Web work

help to discover any Computing Science laws?

What have we built?

Let’s treat the last 10 yearsas a giant experiment

Some well known “laws” about information

do indeed apply

USE

USE

RE-USE

U = 1-R

Factual knowledge is a graph

Terminological knowledgeis a hierarchy

Terminological knowledgeis much smaller

than the factual knowledge

Dataset Schemaclosure

Full closure

Ratio

LUBM 8sec 1h15min 562Linked Life Data 332sec 1h5min 11FactForge 89sec 2h45min 111

Terminological knowledgeis of low complexity

heterogeneityis unavoidable

heterogeneityis solvable

socially,culturally,

economically (and a little bit algorithmically)

publication should be distributed,computation should be centralised

speed increases with parallelisation

0 2 4 6 8 100

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

Input size (billion triples)

Thro

ughp

ut (K

trip

les/

sec)

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 1100

100200300400500600700800900

10001100120013001400150016001700180019002000

Input size (billion triples)

Thro

ughp

ut (K

Trip

les/

sec)

in 2011

in 2010

knowledge about knowledge

Finally:a call to arms

Theory?What theory?

Big thank you to:

Myria Nikolaidou&

Paul GrothAnnette ten TeijeStefan Schlobach

Christophe GueretEmanuele Della Valle

and all at the SemWeb@VUA group