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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".
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
...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/
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.
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
wife/husband/brother/sister
Let's listen in on a phonecall, occuring between two points in the Beltway area, right about now...
RH Walker: "Hi, honey! I submitted an article to SlashDot about your Berners-Lee Tolkien thingy, and that sweet michael was nice enough to post it. You'll be real famous now!"
Leslie Walker: "You... what?"
RH Walker: "SlashDot, you know that 'News for Nerds, Stuff that...'"
Leslie Walker: "I KNOW WHAT SLASHDOT IS, YOU CLOD!"
RH Walker: "But, darling, why are you so upset?"
Leslie Walker: "Because now the newspaper's webserver is jammed by a bunch of smelly Hobbit fanatics who are probably ripping me a new one about my rather sketchy Tolkien analogies, and anyone who might actually buy into my trendy metaphors unquestioningly CAN'T READ THE ARTICLE!!"
RH Walker:"...oops..."
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...
Slashdot must be the Louis Lamour of the web because some of the stories sound vaguely like other stories posted.
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
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
Via mpt: metacrap.
The shareholder is always right.