Evolving the Semantic Web with Mangrove

Despite numerous proposals for its creation, the semantic web has yet to achieve widespread adoption. Recently, some researchers have argued that participation in the semantic web is too difficult for “ordinary” people, limiting its growth and popularity. In response, this paper introduces MANGROVE, a system whose goal is to evolve a portion of the semantic web from the enormous volume of facts already available in HTML documents. MANGROVE seeks to emulate three key conditions that contributed to the explosive growth of the web: ease of authoring, instant gratification for authors, and robustness of services to malformed and malicious information. In the HTML world, a newly authored page is immediately accessible through a browser; we mimic this feature in MANGROVE by making semantic content instantly available to services that consume the content and yield immediate, tangible benefit to authors. We have designed and implemented a MANGROVE prototype, built several semantic services for the system, and deployed those services in our department. This paper describes MANGROVE’s goals, presents the system architecture, and reports on our implementation and deployment experience. Overall, MANGROVE demonstrates a concrete path for enabling and enticing nontechnical people to enter the semantic web.