Thinking Clearly .

Last week POPS—the expertise location service we built for NASA—went into production as an Agency-wide application; it’s thought to be the first “institutional” (that is, business) Semantic Web app deployed Agency-wide at NASA. (I should emphasize that no one really knows whether POPS is the first; but we believe it to be and for good reasons.)

We’re very proud of this accomplishment. It’s proof that SemWeb technologies like RDF and SPARQL are useful for building solutions to information integration problems. We’re also proud because it proves what Bijan Parsia, Andy Schain (NASA HQ CTO), and I thought about this problem from the first time we talked about it in 2005: expertise location is a kind of information integration problem.

And despite all the OWL—and, especially, OWL DL—work we do, this demonstrates that we’re also a pretty good “shallow end” SemWeb app company, too.

We don’t yet know how successful POPS will be at NASA, but if it’s successful, it will be so for two reasons: First, it’s really just a visual query builder for an RDF aggregation that we’ve tricked people into using by building a user interface that reminds people of iTunes—and we owe this to one of our fav HCI researchers, m.c. schrafel and her mspace tool. Second, because C&P Employee #1, Mike Grove, will have, often by sheer force of will, made it a success by writing a ton of good, clean, interesting code; by doing an inordinate amount of project management; and, third, by being goddam unflappable under pressure.

At the launch party for POPS, lots of people were giving and taking credit for it—I don’t disagree with a word of it. Neither Mike nor I said much about any of that because, well, that’s pretty boring. But if someone had asked me, I would have said what I know to be true: POPS is Mike Grove’s baby and it’s all grows up.