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.

Comments

A Medium-Term Solution at Best

[Hanashi]

The semantic web idea might be the best implementation we can come up with right now, but I doubt it'll ever become very successful. It relies on content providers using tags to provide meaning to their information. Not only does this open the door to massive confusion (how do they decide which tags to use in which circumstances, and how will every semantic browser know all the tags?) but it's more work. These two factors will probably kill Semantic technology before it even gets off the ground.

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).