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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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