
The (s|S)emantic (w|W)eb - davidw
http://nicklothian.com/blog/2008/04/30/the-ssemantic-wweb/
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bridgetroll
A useful link is to this transcript of an interview with Tim Berners-Lee:

[http://talis-
podcasts.s3.amazonaws.com/twt20080207_TimBL.htm...](http://talis-
podcasts.s3.amazonaws.com/twt20080207_TimBL.html)

And particularly this passage:

Paul [the interviewer]: 06:05 OK, sounds good. Going a little bit broader than
those questions then, back in 2001 in that Scientific American article, you
and the other authors painted a very broad grand vision of where the Semantic
Web could take us. Did you think we'd be closer to that seven years on?

Tim: Well, for one thing that article was, I think, too sci-fi. I think, that
really what we have... the message has been... it was looking too far into the
future. It imagined the Semantic Web was deployed, and then people had made
all kinds of fairly AI-like systems which run on top of that.

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nicklothian
(I'm the author of the post, but I didn't post it here - thanks to whoever
did)

I've got no problem with XFN and/or FOAF - I've built sites that support them.
The problem I see is that advocates for those formats concentrate on the easy
stuff - a data format - while ignoring the hard stuff - spam, granular privacy
controls.

These problems DO need solving now, though - without them these technologies
are about as useful as meta-data in webpages. Maybe they should relaunch
AltaVista circa 1998 as a new "Semantic Web" search engine..

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robg
The Norvig quote is very misleading. I thought he was both forthright and
realistic about what SW and sw mean today, and to Google especially, during
the Q&A of that talk.

~~~
nicklothian
I disagree quite strongly that it was misleading. That was a direct quote, and
it appeared to me he was making fun of the person who got up and stated "I see
myself as a Semantic Web evangalist... what is Google doing about it." Norvig
went on to say that Google was always watching what was happening in the
space.

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bct
I don't get spam in my feed reader because I select the feeds it's reading.
Does RSS "cope with this thing we call the web"?

It would be great if I didn't have to select the feeds, if my feed reader
would crawl the Web and show me things I like without forcing me to wade
through heaps of crap. I don't think that's very realistic though, so it's
still worth my effort to choose trusted data sources myself.

The same is true for many applications of the Semantic Web. If you want to buy
a house, you won't send out a crawler looking for listings matching your
criteria; you'll go to a site that aggregates real estate listings in your
area. This isn't so different from how things work today.

Spam is a problem and fancy trust stuff is absolutely needed, but RDF &
friends have a lot of value even without fancy trust stuff. The problem is
(and has always been) convincing people with interesting data that they should
publish it.

~~~
nicklothian
So what value does RDF give you exactly - especially compared to an easier to
use format such as Atom or one of the non-DRF varieties of RSS?

~~~
bct
Why are you comparing RDF with syndication formats? Atom and RSS are formats
for data that fits a specific pattern, RDF is a generic data structure. A
better comparison would be RDF and XML.

If there is some advantage to putting (e.g.) real estate data inside an Atom
or RSS feed, you still need a format to represent the data itself. RDF's
advantage is that it's extensible and makes it very easy to combine
independent datasets.

I don't think that Atom/RSS/XML are easier to use than RDF; they're just more
familiar.

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justindz
Seems like the argument is that the Semantic Web (or downcase) has merit but
requires coded trust relationships between data providers to work. So, the
problem is that intelligent people are busy working on things that rely on the
problem already being solved--which it very much isn't. That's a cogent
argument.

So I've recently been dabbling in XFN and FOAF, which are like baby steps
towards some kind of coded trust relationship and the problems there are: 1)
they are insufficient for non-personal relationships, 2) the cost/benefit for
personal users maintaining these coded relationships isn't there and 3) no one
appears to be solving these problems at the moment because they don't really
need to be solved right now.

Architecture Astronauts?

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theproductguy
Nice article (I like your style)... it would be better if people referred to
semantic web technologies as technologies and facilitators of other
applications, not as the abstract, "future" concepts. I address many of these
on my blog -- you may find some of my MI topics interesting/applicable.

