Semantic Web Gathers Substance

David Hersey writes "ADTMag reports that the semantic web technologies are taking real form in the wake of recent W3C approvals and early pioneering work by vendors such as IBM, Boeing, Adobe and others. These technologies have been developing for several years. When and If the finally take form, they hold the potential of raising the capabilties of internet users and internet technology applications to levels that are today impractical due to the web's document-centric architecture."

Comments

hmmm, seems fragile

[jkorty]

The Semantic Web seems to be a generalized version of metatagging combined with a search engine tailored to the format. To work well, this requires 1) everyone to think hard and attach to their pages the appropriate semantics, and 2) that there are few people in the world that deliberately associate all sorts of junk with their web pages in order to get the page to appear in everyone's semantic search.

Re:hmmm, seems fragile

[BorgCopyeditor]

To work well, this requires 1) everyone to think hard and attach to their pages the appropriate semantics,

Exactly. Given that people seem largely unable even to mark up documents with HTML properly, my hopes for the proper implementation of a significantly more "robust" ontology are somewhat dim.

Re:Godel's Theorem?

[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION]

I never heard of that, but I suppose that saying a Semantic Web is in principle capable of more than the "Regular Web" probably violates something Turing said. It seems to me that XML is poorly designed to serve a marginally useful purpose. Why the hell does it have to look like HTML? Instead of all those starting and closing tags tripling the size of my documents, why not just use white space and parentheses or brackets so that it could have maintained some semblance of still being human readable?

I'm not buying into the magical benefits of XML at all. Just because a file is written in XML doesn't mean your computer magically knows what it means (if that's what the semantic web is, then yeah, that violates both Godel's Theorem and common sense.) Your computer still has to know what XML tag to expect where, and what the data actually means in every tag (they can throw vague, poorly understood words like "ontology" around all they want, at the end of the day a human programmer still has to look up the documentation to see what a given tag stands for.)

Perhaps using an XML parsing library is slightly easier than designing your own file format and documenting it properly (you have to document it either way...but XML makes the process more formal, in theory). Perhaps using an XML editor or viewer to edit XML files is slightly easier than using emacs to edit text files. I suspect the minimal efficiency gains from either of those have already been burned away by millions of people trying to read and sort through meaningless noise-philosophies by MBAs preaching the benefits of this New World Order of Ontological Semantic Standardization.

It seems like a meaningless concept

[K-Man]

So far the biggest semantic web project I've seen is IBM's WebFountain, which is basically a big sed script that goes through the web and wraps each stock phrase it finds with meta tags, and enters them in a big database. It seems like a reasonable phrase search would accomplish the same thing.

Not very realistic

[Frans Faase]

In a sense I am a great fan of the idea of a semantic web. But I am affraid that it does not work in reality. As soons as it gains some momentum it will be hyjacked by large companies (MS, Yahoo) trying to commercialize it and by small companies trying to misuse it (spam).

Re:Godel's Theorem?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not buying into the magical benefits of XML at all. Just because a file is written in XML doesn't mean your computer magically knows what it means (if that's what the semantic web is, then yeah, that violates both Godel's Theorem and common sense.)

Well obviously, but if you've got a ASCII file format vs a binary one - which do you think a developer will find easier to understand?

XML is just the next step above ASCII. It's some simple grammar. It's hyped -- but it's still a good step.

Perhaps using an XML parsing library is slightly easier than designing your own file format and documenting it properly (you have to document it either way...but XML makes the process more formal, in theory)

There was this quote on Slashdot a few years ago saying that when a decision doesn't really matter -- when you could do it your own way or via standards, you should choose standards.

Although designing your own format is quite possible, making your own parser isn't, and enforcing syntax isn't (schema/rest), and editors, and I very much doubt if you're going to have a stream-based parser that can process different parts of your syntax simultaneously ;)