Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

How Google Will Have Achieved The Semantic Web

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the perhaps-will-have-done dept.

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.

17 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. Heh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Remember back when we all thought that XML was going to achieve the semantic web by making good search engines unnecessary? Now XML has gone nowhere except as a set of popular libraries for cross-language data serialization, and we're starting to talk about just making really smart search engines.

    1. Re:Heh by primordial+ooze · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

    2. Re:Heh by phats+garage · · Score: 5, Funny

      I'd have to say "Microsoft Bob" peaked pretty early.

    3. Re:Heh by KefabiMe · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Heh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:Heh by Profane+MuthaFucka · · Score: 5, Funny

      Careful, they might implement their XML with just one tag, called 'data', and just stick their regular old Word documents into that as an encoded binary.

      --
      Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
    6. Re:Heh by mcrbids · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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) !!!!!

      --
      I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
  2. Google 2012: The Singularity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    How Google become self-aware and took over the world.

  3. Semantic Web by ZeroExistenZ · · Score: 5, Informative
    Source

    Semantic Web, proper noun

    An attempt to apply the Dewey Decimal system to an orgy.

    Or

    The Semantic Web is a project underway that intends to create a universal medium for the exchange of information by giving meaning, in a manner understandable by machines, to the content of documents on the web. Currently under the direction of its creator, Tim Berners-Lee of the World Wide Web Consortium, the Semantic Web extends the ability of the World Wide Web through the use of standards, markup languages and related processing tools.

    --
    I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
  4. First post? by primordial+ooze · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Very interesting ideas, but I seriously doubt that Google could (or would) try to squeeze a percentage out of every transaction performed using the hypothesized marketplace manager. That just doesn't seem to fit their modus operandi. More likely they'd give place preference to paying clients, much as they do now with the existing search pages.

    But as I said, a provocative read. Metadata truly is the future.

  5. I can see many uses for this semweb stuff by CrackedButter · · Score: 5, Funny


    So, you're a small African republic in the midst of a revolution with a megalomaniac leader, an expatriate Russian scientist in your employ, and 6 billion in heroin profits in your bank account, and you need to buy some weapons-grade plutonium.
    Who does it for you?
    Google Personal Agent
    Now there's innovation and balls in one sentence! I take it the War on terror is won in 2009 or these sorts of semweb transaction become the norm. How *could* Amazon and Ebay compete when it comes to selling nuclear weapons?

    --
    Jonathanjk.com
  6. old article.... by TheClam · · Score: 5, Informative

    Anyone else notice that this is from July 26, 2002?

  7. Well the idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    didn't so much refer to XML the technology as to one of XML's proposed applications. There was a popular theory within the press when XHTML was first introduced that XML would supplant webpages and drag the web back to that primordial point when HTML was intended as a content markup language, not a display language, and even go beyond that. Supposedly we were going to wind up where stylesheets would go beyond just a mapping from XML tags to some set of HTML4 tags, and into a point where content was just a minimal set of XML-tagged text and everything about the way the site displayed was deferred to CSS-like technologies. And when this happened supposedly web browsers would be totally free to reset stuff, and we could toss out amazon.com's presentation of, say, the search results for "Michael Jackson" (as a series of paragraph-delimited links to categories (books, music, etc) to search within in a blocked-off area surrounded by amazon.com's navbars and logos, which then pointed to a series of pages containing little formatted blips of information about various items for sale presented in groups of ten separated by little gray lines in a blocked-off area surrounded by amazon.com's navbars and logos), and instead have it display as a heirarchial file browser or whatever we liked.

    Well, I think it's safe to say that idea's been mostly shelved for the time being. This isn't a matter of a lack of "reaching potential", it's a matter of total failure to move in that direction. XML has been incredibly popular as a storage mechanism but has had roughly zero takeup as a communication mechanism. (There have been communication substrates, such as XML-RPC, based off of XML, but that's not the same thing.) I don't know if it's fair to assume a technology come to fruition within 8 years of being proposed, but I think it's fair to assume that unless we see some kind of signs of progress or interest in progress within 8 years, there's no reason to expect further progress within the 8 years after that.

  8. Other points of view... by Beige+Tangerine · · Score: 5, Informative
    Not necessarily all good points, but as always, it's hard to argue with "people lie" as an argument against anything:
  9. My prediction for 5 years by Julian+Morrison · · Score: 5, Interesting
    ...RDF will be in the same category as VRML: a sexy sounding solution having long given up the search for any real problem.

    Reasons:
    • It relies on worldwide standardized nuance-free semantic mappings, which are probably linguistically impossible for anything but the most contrived of examples.
    • It relies on millions of pig-ignorant dreamweaver jockeys somehow comprehending and correctly operating the above semantic mappings.
    • It relies on said dreamweaver jockeys bothering to do this at all, let alone correctly.
    The real semantic web will involve AI spidering and parsing of human-readable web pages. It will be as inaccurate, but as useful as babelfish. It's the only answer that makes sense -- because that's where all the juicy data is.
  10. Article bit disappointing by mauddib~ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I was actually a bit disappointed by the article. First of all: it is very hard to search in distributed knowledge networks, if not impossible. Some structures, which are a necessity to make explainable in an onthology are possible to describe, but not possible to make deductions on (some of the queries cannot be proved to finish at all). An example are meta-classes (a Chardonai wine can be an instance of the class Wines, in which case a specific bottle of wine can be an instance of Chardonai as well as a normal wine).

    Second of all, the article fails to mention anything about the Ontology Web Language (OWL, see this site on W3), which has become an official specificion of W3C since May this year. This language, based on RDF is much more expressive than RDF is, it also contains several 'language levels' based on the amount of complexity and decidability involved.

    Last, but not least: the article is still very vague on privacy and thrustworthyness. I would think that public-private key cryptography would not do in these areas: far too many single points of failures when, for example registering. Only one user with a hacked account can derail the whole system!

    I'm really interested, by the way, to speak with some people who are deep (at least above their knees) in OWL and RDF. Planning on making a study at intelligent databases and datamining.

    --
    This is a replacement signature.
  11. Oh? by FlutterVertigo(gmail · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Microsoft Bob succeeded, but not in the way you have expected.

    Melinda Gates (nee' French) was the Product Manager of Microsoft Bob.

    (just don't brag to your friends you've known that forever)

    p.s. Microsoft Bob is|was one of the products (along with things such as RedHat) which Virtual PC can run successfully; so it hasn't disappeared completely. I still have a copy sitting here in one of my CD wallets. (Handed out at a Tech Ed or some other conference)