SwirrlSpeak

As we discussed in last month’s blog article, semantics help give meaning to your data, and they make everything more interoperable.

So why has the semantic web not taken over the world? Well, one reason could be that people have the impression that there’s nothing really in it for them: that you have to put a lot in to get just a little back. This stems from the fact that when people think “semantics” they often imagine sprawling xml marked-up ontologies and a maintenance nightmare.

But the semantic web doesn’t need to be hard. It doesn’t even need to use RDF (although at Swirrl, we think that the RDF-triple is a nice way of thinking). Taken literally, semantics is just is the study of meaning in communication. Anything that adds additional meaning to your data is a step in the right direction. The ability to add tags to items is the extent of most sites’ semantic features, but this is better than nothing.

Swirrl takes away the pain of semantics by adding them for you. Imagine you’re typing simple data into a spreadsheet. Normally, the rows represent different items, and the columns represent different properties or attributes of those items. The cells of the spreadsheet store the values of the properties of the items. So, simply by appropriately naming the colums and rows, you’ve just added semantics.

To use Bill’s ice-cream example again, January’s sales (the item) of vanilla ice cream (the property) are $3200 (the value).

Things can obviously get more complicated than this, but this simple example helps to give you an idea of one of the key concepts underpinning Swirrl’s data processing. Just by entering data into an appropriately labelled grid, you can build up data sets with full semantics. The statements produced by this process can be reused in other data sets, searched, and analyzed. There’s no up-front design to do: just create the data as it becomes available, and if you want to change things, rename the columns or rows (thus changing what items or properties you’re referring to).