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The J.R.R. Tolkien of the Web
rhwalker22 writes "In a column titled "Lord of the Webs," The Washington Post's Leslie Walker looks at Tim Berners-Lee ("the J.R.R. Tolkien of the computer world") and the Semantic Web project. Berners-Lee was in Washington recently to tout the project: 'In his futuristic scenario, the Semantic Web offers controlled access to American health care data, plus databases charting the location and status of rivers, underground water, forests and local vegetation, along with economic data on local industries and what they produce -- all marked up in special vocabularies. Those allow scientists to run global queries across the Web, fishing randomly for correlations that might exist between where the sick people lived, worked and played -- such as a polluted stream or industrial dump.'" See an older article on the Semantic Web.
He seems to be more of a do'er than a writer
"such as a polluted stream or industrial dump"
So it's like Slashdot?
Tom Berners-Lee will undoubtedly and correctly be remembered as the Father of the Interweb, but not a single thing of his since then has caught on even a tiny bit. We can stop talking about him now.
As for Tolkein, he'd surely be rotating in his grave if he knew claims being made on his name and work. His anti-technology stance is made very clear in his works and thrown vividly on the screen by Peter Johnson's recent hit movies. It is only orcs and Uruk Hi that use machines, everyone else is "in touch with nature".
Why mention JRR in the title?
It really has nothing to do with it except a Journalist's attempt to get a better headline
This sounds like it would be far too easy for search engine spammers and other scum to subvert it for their purposes. The search they propose could never work without knowing in advance, wether the sources of the information can be trusted. Too easy for PETA and all the other militant environmental groups to start seeding incorrect information to bolster their claims. Same for any other organization with a cause (oil companies, nuclear, you name it).
I have a hard time envisoning this as anything useful, didn't meta tags on web pages teach us anything in the past?
ChuckyG
Semantic Web = Bored Of The Rings.
Bowie J. Poag
Bernard-Lee - Lord of the Ring - Tom Berners-Lee - Tolkein - Peter Johnson
Dunno about "Uruk Hi", that could be wrong too.
we should all be more greatful to America for saving us from our own ignorance.
Nice work retard, maybe you should learn to spell before calling people ignorant. Or just bomb them and change the language.
Bah. He makes a valid point. Do you even know what the semantic web is?
The seamtic web has as much chance of happening as every web page in existance going to valid XHTML within 1 year.
...fishing randomly for correlations that might exist between where the sick people lived, worked and played -- such as a polluted stream or industrial dump
Total Information Awareness for tree-huggers.
And if he pulls it off, the limelight-shy inventor could remake cyberspace all over again.
I have to wonder what problems completely overhauling the internet would cause. Browsers would have to be updated to not only accept the new languages but also work with the older languages that long-time web programers refuse to give up. Then most the average computer users would be confused as to why their older browsers don't work with the "new web" and tech support will be tearing their hair out to fix all the problems.
I'm sure that there are wonderful things that this "new web" can accomplish, but I see the downside outweighing the upside.
bwah-ha-ha-ha
or You mean Tim is a fraud? Is Tom somehow related? Or has MarcA got jealous and changed his name?
As for Tolkein, he'd surely be rotating in his grave if he knew claims being made on his name and work. His anti-technology stance is made very clear in his works and thrown vividly on the screen by Peter Johnson's recent hit movies. It is only orcs and Uruk Hi that use machines, everyone else is "in touch with nature".
Actually Tolkein himself said that the Elves were responsible for the wars of the Ring because they had tried to make middle earth unchanging.
Tolkein was actually trying to recreate a mythology for the British Isles. He knew that it had had one before the Roman invasion and X-tianization.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
... both have "walker" as a last name. I suspect someone's shilling for their wife/husband/brother/sister.
Nice of michael to think of such things. After all, Slashdot's been used for this sort of self-aggrandizing in the past.
Slashdot has ZERO real journalism.
--Mondomor
Thank you interweb founder, and whatever this Semantic thing is.
Computers aren't ready to find resources for themselves.
Nobody (read very few people) use UDDI because it's a silly idea. "Hey, let's just set-up a computer in the machine room and let it go discover some web services....". How the hell is that supposed to work????
Likewise with self discovery of information on the semantic web. We are many many years off allowing a computer to acquire and use information on its own (in mission/business critical systems at any rate). Simply taking an information source off the semantic web without any form of human verification as to authenticity and validity is asking for trouble.
Al Gore must be turning in his grave...oh, he's still alive you say?
Where is my opt out? I want to be able to write in and demand that any information pertaining to me isnt included. All I need is targeted email that says "Dear Sirm, special for you! We have realized you live within 10 miles of a nucluar reactor.. please to find bright flashy pink-on-blue web page linking to tinfoil hat to help! Alex Chiu has made millions with tinfoil hat! Happy shiny thank you!" and imagine the ability to up the "every woman likes a bigger hammer" and compare it to statistical databases about micro-phallus?
ye ghods.. this may "help" in one case, but I can envision about six where it will hurt!
maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
Peter Johnson? Sounds like someone's got a willie fixation...
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
This is my favorite sentence from the article:
And if he pulls it off, the limelight-shy inventor could remake cyberspace all over again.
That's rich. If Tim is so shy why is he a one-man buzzword factory?
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
I don't see the comparison? Why is Tim Berners-Lee like JRR Tolkien? Maybe Marc Okrand but not JRRT.
I never liked you
Then I call being the Sauron of the web. Ash Nazg!
I'll enslave MCSE's to do my evil-orc work.
Nope. The Semantic Web has technically more to do with the blogsphere and its RSS that with the current TBL's WWW. Currently it only lacks the automatic info searching (a Google-like blog search), the publishing is already there.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Suppose for a moment that you were responsible for creating some kind of commercial or enterprise database. For the sake of discussion, let's imagine that it's a database which tracks a retail company's inventory. So you've got various pieces of information to track for things like product name, number, description, quantity, location, ordering information, and so on.
... from super-accurate searching to data mining (as in the article example) to agent technology and AI.
If you were responsible for creating this database, would you create a single table with a single column and dump every piece of information into that field? Of course not, because then the data would be meaningless -- and useless.
Well guess what? The Web is just a massive distributed database -- and right now, every piece of data is indistinguishable from every other piece of data -- just like the above example.
The Semantic Web simply provides the constructs necessary to slice and dice the Web in meaningful ways. It will enable a whole new generation of tools
It's revolutionary. And it's coming.
html like languages are probably the wrong interface for sifting through data. And so what if XML and RDF will lead to some more structured data out there -- and are we really supposed to believe this? What does it matter if you still have to write some kind of software to display or do stuff with that data?
the toy annotation application (annotea) they have set up on the W3C site to showcase the technology is underwhelming. There are exciting applications for semantic nets, agents, personal search engines, classifiers, whatever, but so far no one has done anything interesting with the technology for us end users.
IMHO, search engines will eventually be able to read and understand the context of the words users search for. If that happens, then the search engine could have semantic search capabilities built in, without relying on the content owners to provide special tags. In other words, the benefit without the extra work. I think semantic searches will eventually prove to be of great use, but won't become widespread until search engine technology can support them without changing the content in any way.
A fruit-filled-baked-goods-at-high-altitude dream, perhaps, but an achievable one (eventually).
Check out my eclectic infosec blog at InfoSecPotpou
I have to say, the concept of an enormous database of all of this information that may one day be useful is pretty astounding. Privacy and data accuracy issues aside, I mean. It's the scale of data mining problem that hasn't been seen before other than in the field of genomics. Crazy stuff.
I'm not sure what "the Tolkien of the web" is supposed to be, and I'm battling with myself to avoid making the "Tolkien Ring network" joke that I imagine every Slashbot and his lover is making as I type this. Maybe it just refers to the epic scale of a global digital information suppository, and I'd certainly enjoy that.
Often I wonder if this is the end of the Age of Man. But the Semantic Web gives me hope, and with it we may yet survive.
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
::It's revolutionary. And it's coming.
So's XML, which is why most savy people write sites using xhtml, facilitating as it does some of the things the semanticweb idea is trying to achieve. I suppose people may take the whole thing a little more seriously if semanticweb.org etc were marked up in something more descriptive and versitile than html 4.0.
SEMANTIC WEB 'NOT HERE YET' SHOCK!
Experts across the globe were unanimous today in agreeing that the Semantic Web hasn't happened yet and almost certainly never will, and that nobody would care or notice even if by some miracle it did.
"It's a wonder how this thing has remained vaporware for so long," said one analyst. "Normally, vaporware must actually offer something useful to maintain interest, but the SW just offers mindbogglingly abstruse XML schemas which nobody has any desire to even look at. Maybe that's their whole secret."
Political commentators were equally impressed by the achievement. "There's not much Saddam and I agree on," noted President George W Bush as he thumbed through a copy of the Iliad in the original Greek, "but a total and complete lack of interest in the Semantic Web is surely common ground between all of Mankind."
Biologists studying the few Semantic Web Evangelists known to exist are baffled by their hardy perseverance. The creatures seem able to struggle forever, for nebulous and rather silly goals, in the absence of any kind of reward or recognition. Some scientists postulate that they may be related to J2EE Consultants, although the latter typically require upwards of $200k a year to survive.
The non-news is a blow for 'Just Give It Up Already', a charity whose stated aim is to return Semantic Web developers to the wild, where they can hopefully resume normal lives. "I wish they'd just announce that they've finished and give the heck up," muttered an spokesperson. "I mean, they've had that web page up *forever*."
Even on such popular Internet forums as Slashdot, users risked burning large amounts of karma just to post long, satirical messages in pseudo-Onion format. "It's not much," said kahei, one such poster, "but if I can persuade even one of these poor guys to just let the Semantic Web thing go, then it's worth it."
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
A set of standard images could be used, like "this_site_is_located_next_to_a_sewage_outlet.gif" , or "the_trees_in_this_neighbourhood_ar_particularly_n ice.gif". This way, we could save the world without updating our browsers.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
...everything looks like a nail. XML is text markup, it is not a generic data model. If one wants to make data available to computers, data must be in an accessible relational database system under an agreed-upon, domain-specific data model.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
it's a funny way to say: "The article server is now slashdotted".
Yawn,
The web will cure cancer if we would do a cause effect with a web search. Well the web may contain thousands of databases but what is the value and timeliness and relavance and ACCURACY of the data contained within?
He had his 15 minutes and this exercise in time might yield a nice research paper but to say its revolutionary is bunk its evolutionary at best as was his first "discovery" the web itself. The first sites converted over to the web were old Gopher sites and wow they looked just liked they did before just with a new wrapper. The web is just a gui gopher nothing more. I get so tired to hear he even founded the web. sigh....
Why is Semanticweb.org using tables for non-tabular data?
# make clean sig
It's a simile. The author equates the ability of Tolkien to create worlds based on made up languages with the ability of Tim Berners-Lee to produce a new "web" by inventing those "programming languages" on which the Semantic Web is to be based.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
I don't think he should push the example above. If industry gets wind that it will suddenly become much easier to pin them down as responsible for specific pollution related health and environmental problems, then they'll try and kill it.
They both went to Oxford and I think they were both at Exeter college (Tolkein read English or classics, Bernard-Lee read physics)
While I love the idea of a semantic web with all the inherent collation of disparate ideas that it entails, I really can't see it being built on top of the internet as it stands today.
If it was built on some kind of streamlined academic research network then I could envisage this working, but the internet contains far too much noise to ever get the kind of signal that Tim Berners-Lee is talking about. If anything it becomes more like the SETI program requiring any potential agent to filter through millions of useless or diversionary signals in order to obtain whatever WOW! signal it is generated the search in the first place.
Mind you the idea of a distributed computing project in the vein of SETI using spare cycles to scour the web for question relevant information is kinda cool, dontcha think?
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
Coincidentally, I've spent the last few days checking out XML modeling languages like XMI, RDF, Step 28, and etc. Thus I can say -- this is really cool stuff.
Yeah you do have the problem with trusted sources. But once you've found your trusted source you can integrate its information into your own *much* more easily if it has the same model (a sort of a grammer that says for example that a book record has to have an author field) as the rest of your information. If you can communicate your model, then you can communicate with other people in the language of your model.
This does meant that computers will be much more able to algorithmically pull together information in a way useful to humans. This isn't a cure for cancer, but it could still spawn a large number of incredibly useful tools.
Myrle
As for Tolkein, he'd surely be rotating in his grave if he knew claims being made on his name and work. His anti-technology stance is made very clear in his works and thrown vividly on the screen by Peter Johnson's recent hit movies. It is only orcs and Uruk Hi that use machines, everyone else is "in touch with nature".
It's not really true that only the evil use machines. For instance, the hobbits have clocks, mills, etc. I think he was against technology that is used in a way that hurts people in general. In Galadriel's mirror (to avoid spoilers), part of what was seen was a nightmare vision of the hobbits being enslaved by technology, rather than being benefitted by it.
http://www.planet-tolkien.com
No doubt there are wonderfully valuable uses for this system, but one thing the world doesn't need more of is massive multiple hypothesis testing masquerading as epidemiology.
In California alone, there are 3000 reporting districts and (I'm citing this from memory) >100 types of cancer reported. Naturally, over 30 would-be Erin Brockoviches pop up every year insisting that they're being poisoned because their district is in the top 0.01% for a given cancer.
First explain probability to journalists, jurors and the majority of researchers who still don't get it. Then encourage them to start data mining on an even larger scale.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I keep seeing TBL's hopes for RDF in health care, and it keeps making me giggle. I work for a company that automates medical transactions (eligibility checks, referrals, etc). TBL talks about using XML/RDF to get rid of nasty old X12...a lot of these companies are just now moving to X12, and it's because HIPAA is forcing them to. We still send automated faxes to a lot of them. By the time they're making transactions available to authenticated users over the Semantic Web, we'll all have nanobots in our blood and won't need doctors anymore.
Perhaps it's not "anti-technology" but rather that technology can't save us.. our inner selves and/or human civilization atleast, the same theme is in Star Wars Episode 4. "Everyone else" seems to use machines that are in balance and harmony with nature and society to a constructive end, while the orcs and uruk hi use machines for their own destructive end. This mindset touches at the heart of our collective subconscious.
I write sig's like I know what I'm talking about.
One idea is to create more effective search engines - such as one that can search for the web page of markup language named "shoe" and not return a bunch of results about sneakers.
Though Semantic Web proponents claim that their ideas can achieve great things if implemented, it appears that some of that could be realized on the current Web by training users in creating effective queries for the Google search engine. The trick in this case is to treat proper names such as "shoe" as adjectives in your query. Thus, search not for "shoe" but for shoe language.
Will I retire or break 10K?
No kidding...
PING slashdot.org (66.35.250.150): 56 data bytes
^C
--- slashdot.org ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss
I only got here through news.google.com links...
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
Slashdot must be the Louis Lamour of the web because some of the stories sound vaguely like other stories posted.
I think the connection is that both men are ``founding fathers,'' Tolkien the father of the epic fantasy, and Berners-Lee the father of the Web.
Who is Peter Johnson? Last I heard Peter JACKSON was the director of the LOR movies...(will get an account soon, hence the AC, but just wanted to give credit to where credit is due for us kiwis)
Prior art, but hopefully they'll get something done. But on the other hand ..
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Uhm, Tim Berners-Lee has his name on every recommendation that comes out of the World Wide Web Consortium. Perhaps you've heard about XML? No, he's not among the editors, but the architectural principles he put down has a very significant influence on that, as well as pretty much every other technology that comes out of there. You can argue about the merits of stuff like XML, but you can't argue about the influence of TimBL. That he pulls the strings in the background and are not in the forefront shouting buzzwords, that can hardly be held against him. But if the buzzwords are the only things that you hear, yeah, well then probably you haven't heard too much about TimBL lately.
To me, technologies that TimBL are working on is a big part of my daily life. But there are those of us who write the code and try to make things work who are creating the future, not some Genius on /.
OK, so the connection to Tolkien was probably not the strongest, but that's a minor thing, and I can't help to fear the stuff moderators are smoking when they mod a post with a knee-jerk response like this up.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Remember, they were created in secrecy and held no real 'love' for nature, only it's usefulness.
At least, it's not coming anytime soon without a major breakthrough in real-world ontology construction.
The Semantic Web is getting a lot of the same hype as XML got a short while ago. Most of this hype comes from people who got their first introduction to structured information via XML and related markup languages. These people by and large don't realize that XML and friends are a syntax which does very little to solve the deep semantic problems. If two documents are both in XML, or both have Semantic Web ontology data, you may or may not be able to combine them menaingfully - they may be based on different DTDs/schemas/ontologies, and you're hosed.
Despite the word in its name, the "Semantic Web" brings nothing new to the table for solving these semantic problems. Real AI researchers started working on these issues shortly after the field was created, and there have been no major advances in the last twenty years or so.
Wake me when Cyc can understand any significant fraction of Semantic Web-labeled pages.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
The semantic web is a decent idea, something that search engines are still failing to do...when someone searches for 'growing apples', you shouldn't get links to Apple Computers and whatnot.
But making everyone write this semantic code to describe their web page is just duplicating the information that is already presented, in English (or spanish, japanese, etc.). Efforts toward better natural language processing (NLP) and research in this area would wipe out any need for wasting time on rewriting information in a more machine friendly format.
Tailor machines to humans, not the other way around.
But! A few weeks ago I wrote a simple (and very polite!) spider to look for RDF markup on web sites.
After letting it rip for a few hours, the only web site that it found with RDF markup was my site.
Very depressing!
Really, adding RDF is fairly simple, but people do not bother.
-Mark
No relation, but yes, we both work for The Washington Post Co.
Very funny, but no relation. The only relation is that we are both employed by The Washington Post Co. I just thought Slasdot readers would enjoy the link.
>In a column titled "Lord of the Webs," The
>Washington Post's Leslie Walker looks at Tim
>Berners-Lee ("the J.R.R. Tolkien of the
> computer world")
Funny, but according the the LOTR extra CD content, J.R.R. Tolkien hated parallelism in story-telling. Therefor this statement would make Tolkien himself roll over in his grave.
SL33ZE - Artificial Intelligence is No Match For Natural Stupidity -
Those allow scientists to run global queries across the Web, fishing randomly for correlations that might exist between where the sick people lived, worked and played -- such as a polluted stream or industrial dump.
Or skiing in Australia.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
One Web to rule them all
One Web to find them
One Web to bring them all
And with a schema bind them
Via mpt: metacrap.
The shareholder is always right.
Tim Berners-Lee can't write HTML for toffee and fills all his code with meta-tags containing bad Elvish poetry? I don't see the connection...
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Most. Tenuous. Connection. Evar.
Hey! This isn't Metafilter, cut that out.
invented the URL, not the web. He didn't invent hyperlinks, he didn't invent HTML, he didn't invent the browser, the internet, or even AOL. Some of the first HTML tags were his, and I don't think HTTP is a protocol to write home about.
Boromir, you funny troll, you. I just love your posts. But please explain which part of the suppository you would enjoy most, its epic scale,or the digitalpart?
LtM
You mean Tom Bombadil-Lee?
Create an ontology that maps and relates the similar concepts and vocabulary - works like a translator. That is surely the basics of handling synonyms and related ideas.
Sure it won't handle the rare exceptions you will certainly dream up, but then it doesn't need to. The 80/20 rule is certainly sufficient to provide a very useful and functionally rich tool.
The chances that the ontologies used to label the many different data sources he tosses off in that one sentence will be meaningfully compatible are near zero. People are having enough trouble inside any one of those fields defining XML sublanguages that let them communicate unambiguously among themselves, much less cross-discipline.
I repeat: I'll believe it when I hear that Cyc is being used as a web indexing tool.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
As far as I am concerned, a patient's address is part of the data being held by the American health care. Addresses can translate into GPS coordinates - the means to do this are already available. Rivers can translate into a series of GPS coordinates (not terribly difficult with satellites orbiting overhead mapping the terrain) defining its progress from its source to its destination. Areas of forests and vegetation similarly can be mapped into an area defined by a set of GPS coordinates - again not terribly difficult.
GPS is the commonality between these three independant data sources, so useful information as described by the article can be made into reasonable conclusions with a little programmatic logic. Heck, it can even be rendered visually, which will ease the human identification of disease trends to the human eye.
Economic Data on local industries. Local would immediately infer an area nearby - this again can be mapped into an area of lines defined by GPS coordinates. This too can be used above.
Local production, equally. Factories have addresses and physical locations. Routes taken by delivery vehicles can be mapped out. All of it can be mapped to meaningful GPS coordinates, and all can play a factor in determining the cause and spread of a virus or infection.
All this then boils down to a well defined problem of intersecting lines, which is solvable.
There's your "meaningful compatible" data - physical locations and GPS coordinates. I doubt continental drift is going to throw such a large spanner in the works considering this is about homes, forests and rivers and within someone's lifetime.
It really doesn't take a genius to take two vocabularies and map out what's the same. Translators have been doing this for centuries. That's what helps people talking different languages come to a common understanding. Not everyone on this planet speaks English, a clear indication that forcing one vocabulary isn't required.
And exactly how is Cyc going to make the correct conclusions with obviously bad information any better than people who know the data they are sharing? Garbage in Garbage out - that's all Cyc will understand when its released to surf the dregs on of the Web.
If you think the Semantic Web is supposed to be the complete answer for Artificial Intelligence - you really haven't been paying much attention.
I'm a contractor at NASA/Goddard. One of the areas I work in is taking remote sensed data from multiple sources and correlating it. Guess what: spatial correlation is one of the hard problems, because there are a lot of different coordinate systems in use - lat/long based on one of a bazillion different spherical/ellipsoidal models of the earth, UTM grids, weird polar-centered grids, you name it. Semantic Web labeling of the coordinate systems would help, but without deep semantic knowledge of how to meaningfully convert between the systems, you're still hosed.
Translation between two languages/systems is often straightforward. The probability of meaningful translation among N systems drops rapidly as N increases, though. The hype about the Semantic Web always ends up promising "and then we'll be able to make everything interoperate". It's the same as the early XML hype, and is bogus for the same reasons. Both of them say "all we have to do is label everything and then we can use it all", when getting agreement on the meaning of the labels is an unsolved problem.
I keep mentioning Cyc because they're one of the few groups that have been trying over a long period of time to build universal, interoperable ontologies. They've been at it now since 1984, and they haven't made a whole lot of progress because the problem is hard.
We're arguing past each other here. You think Semantic Web labeling will help a lot; I'm sceptical, based on my background in AI, among other things. We'll see which of us is right about ten years from now.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I assume when someone uses the wrong word on Slashdot that he/she did it accidentally, so I read "suppository" as "repository."
Darn unwashed masses cost me a second of fleeting amusement.
Or maybe I just missed it.
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
Joe Rob Robert? John Raped Regina? Jack Rodent Regime?
Then stop listening to hype and look at the real thing. The Semantic Web _allows_ people who want information to interoperate to do so using a collection of standardised tools and languages. People will decide whether they want to interoperate or not.
And there is the problem. The Semantic Web is not a full AI system - never was it intended to be one. If you are looking at the Semantic Web as a complete solution to AI, it will disappoint you. Its obviously not a tool you'd be interested in using. Its not AI and it never has been.
The Semantic Web is about information sharing, not decision making.
> You know you are "there" when you are known by your first name, and ..... help me out here! ;-)
> are recognized.
> Lemmie see, there is Madonna, and Linus, and
Bill ?
-- From some postings on comp.os.linux.misc
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