Today I came to the conclusion that the services provided by the Registry are far more important than the Registry itself and that we need to spend some quality time thinking about and discussing what services the Registry will offer and how people might integrate those services into their own applications.

As Diane has pointed out many times, one of the challenges we face is “getting people to use the Registry” and I, for one, have always interpreted ‘use’ in that context as ‘register vocabularies’ and our first pass at ‘use’ cases largely revolved around that interpretation. But another interpretation of ‘use’ is ‘use the services provided by the Registry’ and we haven’t talked very much about that, although we do mention it from time to time.

Today I came to the conclusion that the services provided by the Registry are far more important than the Registry itself and that we need to spend some quality time thinking about and discussing what services the Registry will offer and how people might integrate those services into their own applications. This is a train of thought that followed these rails…

Yesterday, Diane and I heard MacKenzie Smith from MIT say “We’re [the semantic web community] are all waiting for someone to build a [ontology] registry because we really need that service.” I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask what her perspective on what that service should offer before she left.

Today, while I’m hauling downed branches out to the road for collection, I listened to Dave Winer discuss wanting to build applications on the Google API and suggesting that Microsoft clone the Google API and remove the restrictions so that users could build real applications based on Google’s services. Then I listened to Dan Farber on the Gilmore Gang talk about the MySQL conference keynote speech by Michael Tiemann (another double-n person) in which he talks about the work of Eric Von Hippel and his book Democratizing Innovation. — from the publisher’s blurb:

“Innovation is rapidly becoming democratized. Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. These innovating users — both individuals and firms — often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich intellectual commons. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centered innovation. He explains why and when users find it profitable to develop new products and services for themselves, and why it often pays users to reveal their innovations freely for the use of all.”

So I began asking myself what services the Registry offered beyond simple ontology exposure, sharing, and discovery that would truly empower and excite builders of applications and realized that I didn’t really know. But I do know that sharing and discovery isn’t enough. What happens to our thinking if we stop seeing the Registry as a ‘registry’ and start to look at it as a toolbox?

And if the Registry is a toolbox, what are the tools? What do they do? Who’s going to use them? Which are the most important?

My personal response is a blank look and a shrug. And that’s not nearly good enough.