

What I Meant to Say Was Semantic Web - mqt
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/what-i-meant-to-say-was-semantic-web/index.html?ex=1350446400&en=532437c4047c9867&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

======
bct
The Web 3.0 label was a bad idea. The people that have the most to gain from
the Semantic Web right now are technical types, and I think most of us are
suspicious of the Web 2.0 label.

The Semantic Web has an (undeserved) reputation for being vapor or hype, "Web
3.0" just exacerbates that.

------
gibsonf1
An interesting article, but could they please have someone edit it before
posting! Thats the most English errors I've ever read in a NY Times
publication - in fact in any major newspaper.

~~~
ivankirigin
That those errors cannot be automatically detected and eliminated is actually
relevant to the overhyped semantic web, no?

Maybe it is some sort of Andy Kaufman level joke.

~~~
bct
> That those errors cannot be automatically detected and eliminated is
> actually relevant to the overhyped semantic web, no?

No. That would require your computer to understand sentences meant for humans;
the whole point of the Semantic Web is that it's machine-readable.

~~~
zandorg
If you could make it understand sentences meant for humans, it _would_ be
machine-readable!

This was the topic of my degree thesis, but I gave up on it (far too complex
to parse everything, and finding useful applications is difficult).

In fact, I think the Semantic Web has application problems. They say things
like auctions, but I don't see what's wrong with SQL for those.

And if you used Google to search the web for millions of currently-listed
auctions on webpages in XML format, you'd have a difficult time trying to find
what you want.

~~~
bct
> They say things like auctions, but I don't see what's wrong with SQL for
> those.

For local data sets, SQL's great. For remote, centralized data sets you can
use something similar.

But once you want to combine data sets spread out over several sites (say,
combining IMDB with local movie listings) you need to express that data in a
format with globally unique identifiers and distributed extensibility. That's
RDF. You can still have a nice query language, see SPARQL (which is much nicer
than SQL, IMO).

> And if you used Google to search the web for millions of currently-listed
> auctions on webpages in XML format, you'd have a difficult time trying to
> find what you want.

Sure, if you're just doing full-text search like Google does. Of course, the
point of having machine-readable data is that you're not limited to full-text
search.

------
awt
Submarine?

~~~
michaelneale
If it is, its not very subtle ;) So probably not.

