
Google could be superseded, says web inventor Tim Berners-Lee - nickb
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3532832.ece
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jgrahamc
Perhaps this is heresy, but I think TBL is overrated. What made the initial
web work was simplicity and loose coupling. A lot of what the W3C has done
since then seems to be adding layers of complexity where simplicity is best.

And the Semantic Web has been talked about _forever_. The money quote in this
article, at least for me, is:

"The challenge, experts say, is in finding a way to represent all data so that
when it is connected to the web, links to other relevant information can be
recognised and established."

Uh huh. I won't be holding my breath.

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wheels
I agree. I wouldn't be surprised to see RDF creep into a niche of the web
where hard-semantic data is already a requirement (and this would just be
standardizing it), but I feel like in both psychology and web structure,
meaning is something that is an emergent property, not something that's hard-
coded into the raw data. Determining meaning from chaos is the impressive feat
of modern search and the human psyche.

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riklomas
You could say that this is what Microformats are trying to achieve. The
problem that Microformats has at the moment is that there isn't enough
developers implementing them to make anything particularly useful, which in
turn puts off other developers from implementing them as they think "what's
the point?". Hopefully in time, Microformats reach a tipping point whereby
it's the next hip thing a la Ajax and Rails.

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jgrahamc
Actually, what I'd like to see is web-wide tagging and then let the tags
evolve. For example, I'd like to be able to wrap anything in a web page with
<tag name="?"></tag>

<tag name="phone">212 555 1963</tag>

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bct
The main difference between your idea and eRDF or RDFa is lack of namespaces.
The "web-wide tagging" and "let the tagging evolve" bits are a huge part of
RDF.

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eusman
Bill Gates said the same about Microsoft ten years ago. The only question is
when. Apparentely though (hopefuly or not) the money they have will be buying
time for them...

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maxwell
The only way I see Google being "superseded" is if they cling to their
business model to the extent that it jeopardizes their products. Web
advertising, in its current form anyway, already looks like a sinking ship.
Unlike IBM and Microsoft, Google inherently has much less user lock-in, so
it'll be interesting to see what they do if their cash cow begins to seriously
dry up.

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ryanspahn
Has there been a term coined for the Internet pervading into our home
appliances - like the toilet, kitchen cabinets, the fridge, etc...

Some may sound silly but there are some amazing things going to happen in this
space!

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anewaccountname
Google has such good spidering and junk-disgarding capabilities that I think
they are more likely to entirely enable the semantic web.

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bprater
I can cook up a whole bunch of metadata to add to my data, too. Now if I can
just get everyone else to do it too.

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maxwell
Actually, I don't think adoption is particularly important. Really all we need
is enough context to probabilistically figure out semantic meaning, and any
metadata helps with that. It's not like you need some top-down data schema.
Google is already doing it this way already. I don't think semantic web
technologies will do much more than make their work a little easier/more
accurate.

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symptic
Not to doubt Tim's statement, but I would reckon Google has this technology in
mind and will have a plan to put into action when the time comes.

