Web Redesigned With Hindsight

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Web Redesigned With Hindsight

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday May 20, 2004 @06:42AM from the just-give-me-two-way-links dept.

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."

16 of 270 comments (clear)

Redesign the web? by 3Suns · 2004-05-20 06:45 · Score: 5, Funny

You can't just "redesign the web" !!

Just who the hell does this "Tim Berners-Lee" guy think he is, anyway!?

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-3Suns

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The Revolution will be Slashdotted
Some open source semantic web projects... by tcopeland · 2004-05-20 06:47 · Score: 4, Informative

...are available on SemWebCentral . There's even an OWL mode for Emacs!

There are also some tutorials and such-like.

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Too complicated to succeed by 14erCleaner · 2004-05-20 06:47 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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Have you read my blog lately?
1. Re:Too complicated to succeed by The+Ultimate+Fartkno · 2004-05-20 06:56 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  What are you, anti-Semantic?
  
  Racist.
2. Re:Too complicated to succeed by The+Ultimate+Fartkno · 2004-05-20 07:10 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  And don't forget the subset of Ontology that only lets you join if you can prove that you have telekinetic or brain-scan ability.
  
  I'm speaking, of course, of...
  
  (wait for it)
  
  PSI-Ontology.
  
  I'm here all week - try the veal!
All those fancy acronyms.. by Mz6 · 2004-05-20 06:48 · Score: 4, Interesting

and the article tells me absolutely nothing about what the technology actually does. About the only thing I saw was:
"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?

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Hmmm.
1. Re:All those fancy acronyms.. by telbij · 2004-05-20 07:07 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Anyone care to shed some light (or links) onto what RDF and OWL actually do?
  
  Anything you want! It's inspired by zombo.com
2. Re:All those fancy acronyms.. by Otto · 2004-05-20 07:27 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  RDF specifies how you can assign properties to things. Like the "manufacturer" of that computer you're looking at is "Dell" or the "creator" of this post was "Otto" or what have you. It lets you describe facts about things.
  
  RDF Schema lets you describe general classes of things. Like that "Otto" is a "person" which makes him a member of "livingPeople" which is a subset of "allPeopleWhoEverLived" and so on. It lets you group things into vocabularies.
  
  OWL lets you define relationships between those vocabularies and draw interferences using those relationships. Since "Otto" and "Mz6" are each a "person", they're the same type of thing. Since this thing is a "computer" that was "manufactured" by "Dell" which is a "company", then it is not a "person" because "companies" are not in the schema of "people".
  
  That sort of thing, broadly put. Anyway, it lets you define stuff in such a way that a computer can understand it and draw meaningful conclusions about the relationships there. The examples are pretty vague, I grant you, but it has potential. Needs a lot of advance work defining everything to get anything particularly useful out of it though.
  
  --
  - Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
20/20 hindsight by oskillator · 2004-05-20 06:48 · Score: 5, Funny

I wonder if he's going to spell REFERRER correctly this time.
Re:Web Ontology Language? by tcopeland · 2004-05-20 06:49 · Score: 4, Interesting

From the OWL FAQ:

Q. What does the acronym "OWL" stand for?

A. Actually, OWL is not a real acronym. The language started out as the "Web Ontology Language" but the Working Group disliked the acronym "WOL." We decided to call it OWL. The Working Group became more comfortable with this decision when one of the members pointed out the following justification for this decision from the noted ontologist A.A. Milne who, in his influential book "Winnie the Pooh" stated of the wise character OWL:

"He could spell his own name WOL, and he could spell Tuesday so that you knew it wasn't Wednesday..."

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The future of the web... by pHDNgell · 2004-05-20 06:56 · Score: 4, Funny

pages full of mySQL errors. *sigh* I need to find something else to do.

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Re:Web Ontology Language? by nacturation · 2004-05-20 06:57 · Score: 4, Funny

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.

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It does keep it simple by truthsearch · 2004-05-20 07:12 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

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Weaving the Web by Milo+Fungus · 2004-05-20 07:12 · Score: 4, Informative
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 original web server and browser written by Berners-Lee was a read/write interface. The browser was an HTML editor, and you could edit pages that you viewed from the server. This makes absolutely no sense to us now, because we've been trained to think of the web as a publishing medium instead of a collaborative medium. The early popular browsers, most notably Mosaic, didn't support editing. This bothered Berners-Lee and he continually requested that they add this feature. He was still thinking of a collaborative web, moving in the direction of the semantic web. The Mosaic (and later Netscape) developers were thinking more about commercialization.
- Tim Berners-Lee at one time was suggesting to CERN (who owned the intellectual property rights to his browser and server, as well as the http protocol) that they relase it all under the GPL. His main goal was to "get it out there" so that more people could work on it, use it, and improve it. It was explained to him that businesses would be reluctant to develop web technologies because of the viral nature of the GPL, so it was released under a BSD-style license that CERN approved.
Metacrap by fawcett · 2004-05-20 08:01 · Score: 5, Insightful
Readers might enjoy Cory Doctorow's essay, Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia, on why the Semantic Web will never succeed. His key points:
- People lie
- People are lazy
- People are stupid
- Mission: Impossible -- know thyself ("People are lousy observers of their own behaviors. Entire religions are formed with the goal of helping people understand themselves better; therapists rake in billions working for this very end.")
- Schemas aren't neutral
- Metrics influence results
- There's more than one way to describe something
sadly... by merdark · 2004-05-20 08:19 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.