Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business Review

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Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business ReviewAlthough I enjoyed this book and have recommended it to others, I can only give it 3 stars. It merits another half-star but I couldn't honestly give it 4 stars.
First, the good. This is a clearly written, non-technical introduction to the "semantic web" in its broadest sense. The author's vision extends beyond semantically enriching the current web to a world where metadata about everything is unambiguous and available on the web in standard, royalty-free formats. "Pull" refers to how this data will be readily available for users and applications. We won't have to go retrieve it explicitly; instead, "we automatically get what we need when we need it" (p. 11).
Much of the book elaborates on numerous companies and efforts to make this the case. Although they all fall short in some way, Siegel argues that they are headed in the right direction and that realizing this vision will increase efficiency in many areas and open up whole new opportunities (e.g. in retail, healthcare, financial reporting and compliance, etc). If you're looking for a comprehensive overview of how semantic technologies are gaining ground, I would recommend the first section of his book.
In the world where all this data is interconnected your personal data will be pulled from what Siegel calls your "personal data locker". It will hold your identifying information and financial credentials as well as various bits of personal information, such as information about your allergies and airline seating preferences. With your permission your bank would pull data about your credentials to provide you with your balance and a restaurant would pull allergy information so they wouldn't serve you food that would make you sick. Your data locker might also contain data about what you're interested in buying (like a car) and for how much, data that somebody could pull in order generate an offer your data locker would pull based on preferences you've set.
While the data locker concept is compelling and developed in detail, Siegel overlooks or gives short attention to two obvious major issues. The first is fraud. As our lives become more entwined with semantically rich data "out there in the cloud" how can we be sure that content is protected from misuse? Siegel says little of value here except to urge caution in sharing our data. He notes that as security and protections increase criminals will have to become more advanced, but he overlooks the fact that the consequences of breaching a centralized representation of one's entire personal data store could be catastrophic.

One also has to wonder how this data locker will persist. Will it have the portability that mobile numbers have (remember what a burden number portability was going to be and how the carriers resisted it)? Will it be controlled by the government or an enterprise that isn't out to profit off you? The most likely scenario is that, much like e-mail services, it will be held as a free service by at least more than one technology giant that will be under pressure to share this data in a limited way that you presumably control. Siegel doesn't address this very plausible scenario nor the likely problems, and history shows that we're often not told the full details on how our personal information might be shared.
All of this aside, my central criticism of Siegel's book and the reason that I gave it 3 stars is that he commits what I call "The Big Ontology Fallacy". The fallacy is to assume that once you have all this metadata open and available, that once your ontological representation is rich and comprehensive enough, that everything else just falls into place. But semantically connected data is simply a better data representation. The processes and infrastructure that will pull this data and utilize it are just as complex. Better metadata doesn't pull itself.
This is important because a book that aims to convince businesses leaders of the value of making relevant data available in an open and unambiguous format should speak to all aspects of this effort. What often happens is that they see the value in the open and available data portion without realizing the massive effort required to build all the applications that will use this data, and once this happens ideas like the data locker seem hopelessly far-fetched. I wish Siegel had said more about this other component because in my experience it is a significant barrier to getting businesses to move in the direction he advocates.Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business Overview

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