

Don't Panic: Facebook is the Private Beta of the Semantic Web - mbleigh
http://intridea.com/2010/4/23/facebook-is-the-private-beta-of-the-semantic-web

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rfreytag
The Semantic Web when it arrives will be fully federated like the Web we have
now.

No way will I or most people I know be happy with a significant resource (like
a Semantic Web) being owned or subject to the whims of one or a few people or
organizations. Open Access controversies gives a hint of how much unhappiness
will result if Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or any one entity looks to have a
lock on such a vital web resource.

~~~
shmichael
I'm not happy by Google's dominance of search & email, and yet it is there.

Here the matter is even worse due to the network effect: if most of your
friends are using facebook's social tagging service, you'd have to be
connected to it one way or the other.

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dantheman
how does google dominate email?

yahoo has more email account than google.

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stcredzero
So we shouldn't mind the internet becoming a corporate-totalitarian mining
town because there's a bright future ahead to be built on the initial
infrastructure brought in by the corporate rulers?

I would ask why companies lose or relinquish control of such company towns,
and would the same factors work online?

To get the ball rolling, I would posit that the same factors _won't_ work.
Data can't be relinquished in the same way that land or mineral rights can.
For example: once the graph of my college friends is out there, there's no way
I can ever reliably take it back.

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tokenadult
As a historical fact, corporate mining towns are a thing of the past in the
United States, and the great-great-grandchildren of the miners enjoy a
prosperity that was unimaginable even to the mine owners back then.

~~~
stcredzero
Thanks for another reiteration of the OP premise. No one disputes history
here. The devil's advocate position and the question raised are about the
reasons why and how well those factors would work online. If we can figure
this out, then this might give us a clue as to how specifically this might
play out.

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mschwar99
My idea of a semantic web is when the data on the web has value added to it by
being able to tie disparate pieces of data together. The thrust of what
Facebook is doing seems to be tieing my identity to data on the web. That's a
different value prop.

One makes the web more usable to me, the other makes me more usable to other
people.

~~~
mbleigh
But with the Open Graph protocol you do get the ability to tie disparate
pieces of data together. For instance, let's say that I examine someone's
tweet stream for links. If I fetch the OG data for each of those I can tell
you whether they tweet most often about people, or movies, or whatever. I can
show you a thumbnail display of images representing the things they linked to.

Open Graph is most definitely semantic web. Liking is just one possible
application of that semantic data.

~~~
mschwar99
Oh yeah - I definitely agree.

I guess my thought was just that the semantic lens is focused in a different
direction that I imagined. The mental model I always had was that the semantic
info would let users make connections between datasets that model our physical
world rather than datasets that monitor users themselves and how they use the
web.

This is just a different use case than I imagined.

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mark_l_watson
I just took a better look at Open Graph. Certainly marking up pages with RDFa
tags using standard Ontology's for properties and classes could be a useful
thing.

The problem as I see it is that the Facebook corporation strongly discourages
spidering the Facebook web site. It is certainly their right to do so, but
from a research point of view it is a shame that it is not allowed to spider a
portion of Facebook to get the RDF graph. It is difficult to know if something
is useful if you can't play/experiment with it.

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jasongullickson
I'd be careful with drawing positive analogs to "how the west was won", in
light of the results it had on the indigenous people, cultures and the
environment.

...unfortunately the analogy is perhaps apt.

~~~
mbleigh
The analogy was meant to be more drawn to the frontier colonization of space
as written in numerous sci-fi novels, but point taken. Luckily, I'm not
entirely sure who the indigenous citizens of the internet would be to be
damaged by rapid territorial expansion.

~~~
swernli
Us.

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mark_l_watson
I have a problem with tossing around the term Semantic Web when their take is
so much different than mine. The SW is about standards (RDF, RDFS, OWL,
SPARQL, HTTP, using URIs to represent things and concepts, etc.) and a very
large number of linked data publishers who hopefully use at least some common
Ontology's to define classes of businesses, information sources, people,
organizations, places, events, etc., etc. and to define the properties that
have ranges and domains that are these standard classes.

I take a bit of heat for being a SW proponent but I believe that long term
this is a big thing. I could be wrong, though.

~~~
mbleigh
Open Graph is based on RDFa and is a "standard" by which website owners can
use URIs to represent a number of people, places, things and concepts. I admit
that I tossed the term semantic web out there without fastidiously studying
the accepted definition, but by the one you proposed I think Open Graph meets
it.

~~~
mark_l_watson
You are absolutely correct that RDFa is a SW technology. I must admit some
prejudice here: I went from thinking that RDFa was very useful to being
skeptical when HTML5 won the standards war against XHTML. When I get back from
vacation I would like to dig into what MySpace is doing; I just bookmarked
your article and will look at it next week.

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izendejas
If Facebook is at least a bit nice (and smart), they will use Freebase types
to make it easier to link data.

Allowing people to free-handedly add entities will be such a mess--no
different from what we have today.

It's not enough to link people to urls. It'd be better to link people to
standardized, uniquely identifiable (unambiguous) concepts.

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SlyShy
Considering how much of a mess HTML5 adoption is, I'd be extremely surprised
if RDF or anything similar is "eventually" merged into the browser. Maybe for
an extremely distant "eventually".

~~~
mbleigh
The great thing here is that the browser vendors don't even have to do it. It
could be handled entirely by browser extension developers for now, and once it
catches on enough to make some waves, the browser vendors will want to pick it
up as a "cool new feature". Once one vendor does it, others will fall in line
so as not to appear behind.

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jaekwon
Will "like" data be just as available, or does Facebook get to own that data?

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mtarnovan
More like the oh so public beta.

