Be the first to like this
The Semantic Web vision emerged with a promise to collect and interlink semantically relevant data from diverse sources in order to to achieve a full potential of the Web. After more than a decade of diligent research, it is the time to start summing up what has been accomplished and how mature Semantic Web research is, so that plans for the future can be charted. One of the key trails of a mature discipline is to have well-designed research methods allowing researchers to establish evidence about the effectiveness of the research ideas. It is equally important to to have knowledge translation methods that allow for transferring the established evidence to decision makers in practice. In this talk, we will first share some experience and challenges in conducting experiments in the area of the Semantic Web. We will next discuss findings of systematic reviews conducted to estimate the level of quality of the existing research results based on the criteria well-known in medical research and recently adopted in empirical software engineering. We will conclude the talk by discussing the importance and potential milestones for the Semantic Web in order to become an evidence-based discipline (similar to medicine or education) capable of producing strong research evidence transferable to practice.