Being old enough to remember the Alvey Programme and having worked on the EU ESPRIT programme I'm just a wee bit skeptical when I hear a politician making any announcements about funding one particular area of CS research.
The Semantic Web has always appeared to me to be good old symbolic AI with a dash of angle brackets.
The thing that bugs me is that fast-broadband, from what I can tell, has been rolling out just fine without any government interference. I wouldn't want the government to take credit for and therefore stewardship over something that the private market can easily achieve by itself.
Maybe they have been more involved than I thought, though. Need to investigate more.
It is utterly incredible what an election you are likely to lose will prompt politicians to promise.
Over here the election has begun in earnest, with the big guns coming out in just one day to promise big new initiatives - from a industrial strategy for green energy and biotech, to UK Space Agency to Semantic Web-enabled government departments.
Some of this is aiming in the right direction, like releasing OS maps, broadband for digital poor and access to government processes online. But some of this terrifies me - "allowing users of government services to identify themselves simply and definitively" sounds like an ID card online.
I love that Gordon has been listening to some of the right people. I am scared that my government is going to try and go online when they support things like the Digital Economy Bill copyright sections. Whoever wrote this speech did not do the policy work on clause 17.
The tories have been surprisingly on-the-ball with support for open source IT and similar so with both main parties supporting positive moves in this direction the only problem will be if they're all talk and do nothing about it when the time comes to actually take action.
But some of this terrifies me - "allowing users of government services to identify themselves simply and definitively" sounds like an ID card online.
What they're promising is a decent single sign on service like Google/Yahoo/MSN. It's a little bit silly to have so many Government logins for different services. Government Gateway was one example but it was way to clunky.
The Semantic Web has always appeared to me to be good old symbolic AI with a dash of angle brackets.