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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.
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
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.
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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).
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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
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
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