Slashdot Mirror
Web Redesigned With Hindsight
Randy Sparks writes "Tim Berners-Lee has been speaking about his vision for the Web. He proposed the Semantic Web six years ago and it's taken that long for the W3C to ratify his plans for Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL). Effective the Semantic Web is the Web as we know it put into database form and with added metadata. You can read more about it over on MacWorld and see a Semantic Web proof-of-concept at the Web Archive."
In hindsight, it would have been better to design the web with major help from the porn industry, since that is mostly what it is used for anyway.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
You can't just "redesign the web" !!
Just who the hell does this "Tim Berners-Lee" guy think he is, anyway!?
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
...are available on SemWebCentral . There's even an OWL mode for Emacs!
There are also some tutorials and such-like.
The Army reading list
The web is popular because it's easy to create web pages. The semantic web stuff strikes me as something that only someone with a PhD in semantics could love. IMO it violates the KISS principle.
Have you read my blog lately?
"The aim of the Semantic Web is to add metadata to information placed online, to allow it to be readable by machines. That context would enable automation of a variety of interactions. An online catalog could, for instance, connect to a user's order history and preferences to a calendar, to automatically pick out available delivery times.".
Wow... just simply amazing.. *sigh*
Anyone care to shed some light (or links) onto what RDF and OWL actually do?
Hmmm.
I wonder if he's going to spell REFERRER correctly this time.
In related news, Verisign was quoted as saying, "Move along now. Nothing to see here..."
<insert witty linux comment here>
Good thoughts, it's a shame that Microsoft's bundling of IE with Windows makes anything the WWW Consortium largely irrelevent, even when the specs come from MS themselves (CSS).
That being said, relying on publisher embedded meta-data to be relevent on the WWW is probabally wrong. Someone, somewhere, is going to try to lie in that metadata as a way of making money.
Burn Hollywood Burn
The Army reading list
that slashdotters would prefer that each and every website be redisgned. Further, they would like to espouse their desire to have the entire WEB be redisigned (starting with Slashdot) with what many /.'ers feel is the ultimate Web Developer Tool
The macworld article isnt very informative to someone who've never heard of this "next generation" web, but it seems like they want to add it on top of the existing WWW.
Why cant someone just invent a new similar, improved web that is separated from the current WWW, with its own specific browser, and implement the various ins, outs and whathaveyous to keep the riffraff from exploiting it in very annoying ways?
This kind of thing goes to show how much difference can be made by getting the initial trajectory right.
A few small changes at the start can lead to BIG consequences later as the inertia of the whole mess gets going.
Anyone else out there with a really great idea? Do us all a favor and think as far ahead as you can before you release it on the world. Even then, it will still eventually not be going in the optimal direction.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
pages full of mySQL errors. *sigh* I need to find something else to do.
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
Shouldn't that be WOL, and not OWL?
It was supposed to be called the Advanced Web Ontology Language, but the specs for it went missing.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
The next question would be: Why isn't that website built semantically? Nested tables? bleh.
For those wondering what the Semantic Web is behind all the computer babble:
The Semantic Web Cereal Box analogy
Plain Talk.
Tim Berners-Lee had been saying right from the beginning that viewing a web page should be integrated with creating it. In the early 90s, of course, the infrastructure was just not there, but when the technology did catch up, look how wikis have succeeded! Of course, it is the social aspect as much as the technical that makes wikis like the good old 'pedia what they are, and I doubt if Berners-Lee anticipated that, but nevertheless I'd say that the success of wikis proves him to be a true visionary.
- Intelligent search engines that produce much better results than Google etc. because they can index the meaning of documents, not the words they contain.
- Agent technology that can retrieve information for you, price compare items you are shopping for and automate a number of interesting processes.
- Automatic clustering of website around subjects of interest to create much richer knowledge-oriented navigation.
But the Semantic Web project can't succeed as it is currently specified. It is working towards standards for storing and managing the meta-content required for this Brave New World but doesn't tackle the much harder problem of how to create meta-content that is consistent and pervasive. At present this is left to individual web page authors with no mechanism to ensure consistency. Without consistency, the Semantic Web is doomed. If I tag a web page as being about "software engineering" and another person uses the tag "computer programming" the Semantic Web can't tell they are about the same thing.In a world where an estimated 70% of web pages don't even have a title isn't it rather unrealistic to expect most web page authors will learn a complex new representation like RDF and consistently tag their pages with it?
Clay Shirky has a very good article on this. I recommend reading it before you get too excited about the Semantic Web.
Sailing over the event horizon
...Time Berners-Lee? I thought he got knighted.
He may have, but I wasn't aware he got acquired by Time Warner.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Hi there,
Kind of a late reply here, but i had to take care of some emails.
Anyways, I used RDF in a proprietary OWL-like software company for the purpose of organizing content repositories in a formal language that would span the domain of the company i was working for.
14erCleaner noted that the web is popular b/c it is so easy to create web pages. I would have to agree with this, and also add that the reason why the RDF and OWL spec are important is along the lines of what nizo posted about the web being all about porn! There is SO much content, and yet to derive any kind of automated meaning from all of it, would be a task that is almost out of the scope of realisticly ever completing. There is no standard to the structure of documents, nor how one document may relate to another.
The RDF and OWL specs provide a framework that do exactly that. Berniers-Lee and the RDF working group essentially lay down what is infact (sorry 14erCleaner, but a 20 yr old intern got it pretty easily) a simple (yet ambiguous) way of describing something. It is like this. Something-RelatesTo-Something. Read the spec and keep that in mind, and that is the basis of what they have described. The OWL i am not as familiar with (too busy building a proprietary one!!)
anyways, enuf rant, i would encourage everyone to read what he has to say, and most of all, if you are a web author, use the RDF spec! imagine if instead of using google to do a text search for whatever was on your mind, you could write a sql statement that actually represented the structure of resource web pages on the internet and brought you to a list of documents relating EXACTLY to the Something-RelatesTo-Something sentence you had entered as your query! That is the true possibility of this "redesign"!
~not there any longer, but a good plug for this technology - they are making ontologies for health care purposes, basically all the info surrounding the care of a premature baby! Can't get a more noble cause than that!
http://www.cstlink.com/
The semantic web does keep it simple. It's supplimental to current web pages and is optional. It simply adds more data for computers to read. It's something very basic that leaves the opportunity for much more complex things later. Anyone who can't understand a triple - a subject, verb, and object - probably failed second grade english.
Developers: We can use your help.
The semantic web was discussed at some length in Weaving the Web - The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee. I picked up that book for something like $5 at my university's bookstore in the discounted rack. That's one of the more interesting books I've read about computer history, and it got me thinking a lot about web standards. I have since learned CSS and XHTML and I've vowed to never go back to proprietary "HTML" hacks. The new way is better, anyway.
The semantic web doesn't make a lot of sense to people who were introduced to the web through commercial means in the mid-to-late 90's (which is most people). But it makes perfect sense in light of what Berners-Lee was originally trying to do with the web. It has gone a long way to degenerating into Just Another Way to Market Stuff to Millions of People®.
Two points were most interesting to me in Weaving the Web:
The semantic web is the return of the snake oil salesman of the 70s and early 80s who highjacked AI research with undeliverable promises of intelligent machines "just around the corner".
s ho ld=-1&commentsort=1&tid=95&mode=nested&cid=9207128
To this date, serious AI researchers are still paying the price of this scientific fraud, which makes cold fussion look like a prank.
Tim Berners-Lee is a good person and not a computer scientist so he has neither the knowledge nor enough malice to understand the pack of thieves he has surrounded himself with.
I'm not the only one saying this:
Semantic web is doomed to failure precisely because it is being pushed by a group with a reputation for talking rather than doing.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=108295&thre
I already saw the box for it
given the nature of what they are trying to do with the sematic web stuff, and how using some sort of tagging/xml schema to define relationships, does this set the stage for a rule base like set of interactions to autmatically execute when the proper relationships are created that meet pre-defined rules? this would allow interactions between servers to happen naturally and allow for self-organizational-like qualities to 'emerge' from the web.
or i'm just a dreamer.
just a thought though...
Having access to tons of annotated data is a wonderfull dream. I could see academic institutions going for this, but not corporations for the most part.
You see, corporations don't WANT you to be able to access data easily. One of the major driving factors of the current web is advertising. Basically, this is something none of us want to see, but with web pages it's easy to try and force us to see it. Properly annotated data would kill advertising as we know it, something the corporations will not let happen.
Also, corporations do not want us to be able to easily compare data either. Take prices for instance. Many stores have promises like "we'll match any price". This worked on the basis that it's hard and tedious to go check other prices and people will think "well, hey, if they are making this promise surely they already have the lowest price otherwise everyone would be calling them on it". Well, no, most people will not go check for lower prices, and if they do and end up finding lower prices elsewhere, they will often buy elswhere. Easy price comparisons are not something online stores want to allow.
Ulitmatly, most sites want to force you to look at data they want you to look at (ads). I doubt we'll ever see all web data in a nice annotated form allowing us to view only what we are interested in.
I admit, I use Golive for my websites. Because it does most of the work for me - and together with some scripted exporting and stuff I hardly have to touch the code, and it's nicely compliant and lean. I *can* code. I just don't really enjoy it, and it's not worth it for the amount of work I do nowadays.
;-)
I'd love to jump on the next thing, and I see the use of all this meta stuff. I try to treat meta tags with respect btw, and only use them on relevant pages.
But for this to take off, you'd need tools that organize the meta data FOR you. So that you only have to edit it lightly, to take out the silliness. Akin to using automated translation.
Which begs the question: why not make search engines and agents smarter instead?
I mean, I can't be the only lazy person here, can I? And I have sort of an interest in the stuff, so I'd probably do what's required, but most people wouldn't I'm sure.
If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on agents - even after all the bullshit and the failed expectations from the late '90s. I'd love to have some clever agents do my searches for me, and on the mac, there are already some pretty clever programs available for free (http://www.devon-technologies.com/)
(yeah, I'm too lazy to put this post in HTML too, so sue me
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Technologies like this are typically doomed to failure, because they violate one key precept-
computers should work for us, not the other way around.
Few people will bother with the effort of semantically marking up their documents, and
fewer still will do so in a way that is consistent in any way to be useful.
Computers / programmers will need to become better at analyzing human communication, anything else
hardly seems worth the effort.
Nice idea though.
You might find Dublin Core Metadata as an easier way to start than the W3C page for OWL.