How Google Will Have Achieved The Semantic Web

alfaromeo points to a business feature (mysteriously available already) by one Paul Ford called "August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web." So read on for a bit of potential history from five years in the future.

Comments

Slashdot purpose

[someguy456]

So I guess since ./ couldn't handle the past, and is failing miserably with the present, it will now resort to fortune-telling?

Editors, could we at least keep the dupes down? :)

But none of this ever happened

[Halcyon-X]

because all of the patents to do so were tied up between various companies that didn't want to cooperate with each other.

Re:Heh

[primordial ooze]

Remember back when we all thought that XML was going to achieve the semantic web by making good search engines unnecessary?

Not really, and XML is still such a recent development that to say "Remember when" is silly if not outright disengenuous. I was at the SGML '86 conference in Boston where the XML initial draft was presented. That's less than ten years ago. Can you name a information technology that reached anything like its full potential less than a decade after its first mention?

Re:Heh

[KefabiMe]

I RTFA. Intriguing, but it would be a huge struggle for Google to become like anything in the article. There's too much money in having the right information at the right time.

"Now XML has gone nowhere except as a set of popular libraries for cross-language data serialization..."

XML is still getting more popular and more accepted with each passing month.

The biggest issues are that there are a few monstrous companies out there that want to control the standard of how information is shared, and mutate XML into some proprietary form that their company can control.

XML is a good thing, like most standards. Standards can fall short at times, especially when the uber-companies start trying to fight for control over them. I believe that this fight for control will do more to prevent the easy transfer of data, more than any problem with XML itself.

BB

[jals]

I started off reading this and gradually got quite excited by the ideas presented.

About half way through I mistakenly thought I was reading an online copy of 1984.

The benifits of this happening sound fantastic. It just sounds very cool for everyone to be connected like that - which is what scares me even more. Here is an absolutely huge privacy concern; and it has me totally excited about the prospect of it happening.

Sorry to go slightly off topic, but it's things like this that worry me a lot, that a possible 1984 scenario could disguise itself so well that even a person like me - who is verging on (if not already there) being a member of the tin foil hat brigade - excited by the very idea of it.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember back when we all thought that XML was going to achieve the semantic web by making good search engines unnecessary?

Nope. I remember a bunch of people with no clue hyping it up as such, but anybody actually involved with XML in any technical capacity, including the creators, understood that it was simply a standardised syntax for file formats. So-called pundits jumped on each others' bandwagons in touting it as some kind of miracle, but anybody who actually knew what they were talking about wouldn't make claims about XML that you reckon.

Re:Heh

[mcrbids]

Within ten years the DNS will have migrated to an XML format.

I've heard some RETARDED statements on /. before, but this near takes the cake. DNS using XML?

Whatever you are smoking, I want some - 'cause it's clearly some REALLY GOOD SHIAT!

Given that:

1) DNS is a protocol, not a data format, and

2) XML is a data format, not a protocol, and

3) DNS is incredibly light and efficient, and

4) DNS has already proven that it scales well to just about any size, and

5) XML offers no particular advantage, since you could serve DVD ISOs over the DNS, and

6) moving to an "XML PROTOCOL" format would require the update of every single DNS server on the face of the earth, many of which are still running Bind 8.x, and some are still running BIND 4.X for god's sake,

I consider this to be HIGHLY UNLIKELY(tm) !!!!!