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Tim Berners-Lee and the Semantic Web
An anonymous reader writes "As we all know, Tim Berners-Lee is the hero of the Web's creation story--he conjured up this system and chose not to capitalize on it commercially. It turns out that Sir Tim (he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in July) had a much grander plan in mind all along--a little something he calls the Semantic Web that would enable computers to extract meaning from far-flung information as easily as today's Internet links individual documents. In an interview with Technology Review, the Web-maestro explains his vision of 'a single Web of meaning, about everything and for everyone.'"
So, once this is off the ground, who wants to bet that the answer really is, 42?
Seriously though, this could be really cool, but I imagine that this could have some very adverse effects on privacy given the amount of information that finds itself on the web. Items that are linked by obscurity in disperate places would be easily linked into a single profile (If the stuff he's talking about isn't primarily smoke and mirrors). Either way, like any powerful technology, it will have both good and bad consequences. Here's hoping for the good...
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
and has been for over a decade (or more).
...when the man himself signed up for a user account. w00t!
The Army reading list
Well, beyond the "knowledge management"-type mumbo jumbo, anyway. Some basic definitions are here, here, and .
...as soon as web services are up and running.
This is to insure against a monoculture that is so disastrous in computer circles as demonstrated by the numerous security failings of Windows...
See the original here.
:-) I've never read any of them, I only know this Berners-Lee fellow from the headlines.
Actually Slashdot posts this article over and over again every few months, with basically the same headline (sometimes "and" sometimes "on" sometimes "Tim" sometimes not). Kinda bizarre really.
As we all know, Al Gore is the hero of the Web's creation story.
This always gets asked - and a partial answer is right here.
Eclipse plugins, visualization tools... there's some good stuff there.
The Army reading list
The rest of us call this... GOOGLE.
works for me.
Except for China, they get their own semantic web with special semantic filters in place that semantically keep their citizens under semantic control.
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
If you'd like an opposing view, make sure to read Clay Shirky's take on the semantic web.
A topic I posted a few years ago is perfectly relevant to this submission: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=92504&cid=7953 441
Bah! What does this bozo know about the web and where it should go??? It's not like he's devoted any of his time or effort into creating something as important as the WWW...
/sarcasm
In Soviet Russia you were never funny!
"...enabling computers to extract meaning from far-flung information as easily as today's Internet simply links individual documents."
i wonder if this could be used for a computer's local file system as well. I know microsoft is working on this (WinFS or OFS or whatever it's supposed to be called), but it would be damn awesome to apply this not just to the internet.
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
The extra work required to put data into a standard data format won't be done. People can't bother making their pages w3c complaint (even slashdot). The second problem is that data formats can rarely be agreed upon by a large community. Look at how many calendar event and news feed formats there are.
I'm so tired of Semantic trying to take over all the security tools. Are they now trying to take over the Internet? I mean really, Semantic Antivirus totally sucks ass big-time!!! And don't get me started on Semantic's SystemWorks tool and how bad it blows!
Oh, wait a minute...
...a team in Redmond is tasked to make sure that Microsoft own the "single Web of meaning, about everything and for everyone."
Ulrik
Because he chose not to capitalize commercially on the Web? How is the measure of your altriusm the measure of your heroism? I understand that many people DO feel that way, but nobody has ever really explained WHY heroism is a necessary consequence of altriusm. Why is someone who makes a profit necessarily evil? The man who invented a corrugated-cardboard coffee-cup holder holds a patent on it; every Starbucks coffee sold puts a penny in his pocket. Why is that wrong?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
iCal and RSS. The present problem is that people hate everything XML. Kind of hard to do semantic anything if people don't like the way your doing it.
Indeed, anything that offers a "single Web of meaning, about everything and for everyone" is truly a scarry concept to me, philisophically, of course.
I really do love all the very different meanings that the human mind can create from all the very same things.
As has been stated many times, content producers will spoof semantic data just like they used to with the META tag...which is why no one uses the META tag anymore. Relevance algorithms take into account link analysis and statistical text analysis to provide a much more truthful representation of what data is there. Sorry Tim.
...from the minds of Alan Kay, David Smith, David Reed, and others...
I want to offer an alternative, as proposed by Victor Raskin at Purdue. I speak for neither Sergei Nirenburg nor Victor (who does enough talking for himself).
:)
While this idea for more thorough, concise, and accurate searches is a good one, I would question whether embedding semantic tags into web pages is the way to go.
As outlined in Ontological Smenatics, there is an automated system of semantic processing already underway. Basically, it takes a text, then runs it through a parser, which looks up meanings in a lexicon, then reduces whatever translation it comes up with to a text-meaning representation (TMR), by pushing the concepts from the lexicon through an ontology / onomasticon / world-knowledge library. The TMR is basically the "pulp" of the semantics of the article, web page, book, or whatever it's been fed. It just contains the ideas, the things involved, and other relevant concepts, stripped of all other linguistic information.
TMR is great, becuase the TMR can be used then, by reversing the process and using the lexicon of another language, to translate a text from one language to another.
However, it seems to me that with the bits and pieces of the TMR stored in a search engine's index, this could be a huge boon for the search engine.
Instead of just trying to match keywords, by parsing the TMR of web pages and by parsing TMR of search strings, you no longer search for keywords, but keyconcepts.
The advantage to semantic searches / indexes by this implementation is manifold:
-Searches (and the web as a whole) will gain the richness Mr. Berners-Lee is advocating.
-Web authors will not be able to lie in their semantic tags, or otherwise misinform spiders what the page is about (remember tags?)
-No extra work is required in the actual construct of the web or *ML standards. The TMR is only generated and stored by the sites / processes that need it.
-Others?
Just an alternative solution, for fun
I remember reading about this obscure thing called the interback in 199O. I was a kid back then, and I equated A0L to the interback. Berners-Lee was mentioned in that article, and I thought, "so what? Who needs such a system?" It wasn't until much later, around 1995, that I connected to the Internet in earnest. Even then, World Wide Web browsers at the time were mostly centered around NCSA mosaic. Netscape has just started being disseminated, and Microsoft didn't even have the Internet on its radar.
The fact that Tim has been trying for 15 years to sell this idea with little success indicates that he approach is insufficient. He is pitching the idea just like a startup would, giving cool examples and everything. But in practice, all he is doing is proposing and overseeing standards. Developing standards for an idea is not what is required to prove that an idea works. Standards should follow successful technology, not vice versa. You need to have companies that make products professionally and offer complete solutions (i.e. make it work real-life situations). Doing it for a very simple example that he quotes ("find pictures taken on sunny days") itself is a big, big deal. Perhaps Tim should get involved with companies in this field as an advisor/consultant. You know, there are enough smart people out there who could develop the standards. But very few people with his name and recognition to truly ignite commercial interest in his ideas.
Here is an account that predicts that Google will leverage its search results to create a Semantic Web. I see this as a distinct possibility. Especially Google leveraging its search results to help people buy and sell stuff.
Maybe because we've sunk so low as a society (for various reasons. some obvious, most not). We need heros to admire and aspire. Unfortunately a lot of "heros" get left on the cutting-room floor.
Let's hope this fails.
History tells us that anything that has a
"single Web of meaning, about everything and for everyone" is really bad, no matter how tempting it is.
Freedom of different meanings is so much more sexy.
...have the words "Don't Panic" prominently displayed?
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
-3, Anonymous Coward.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
It's just unrooted gopherspace, with a near-total lack of control over the download process (in most gopher clients, you had to choose to get an image - making banner ads impossible, and low-speed connections more useable).
Yawn yawn.
Incidentally, if you weren't on the net before NCSA mosaic, or have never used GOPHER, you don't need to bother replying to this post. Trust me, "surfing" gopherspace was trivially different from "surfing" the web, until the web went commercial.
This is like how Darwin constantly gets credited with "inventing" the theory of evolution (when actually Matthews published it in 1831, 30 years previously, as acknowleged by Darwin himself) or the way Uda's name always gets left off his invention (Uda was the principal inventor of the Yagi-Uda antenna).
Give Tim credit for helping develop the first web browser, he deserves that recognition. But calling him the "inventor" of the web is like calling Sir Isaac Newton the "inventor" of gravity!
The common thread to the Semantic Web is that there's lots of information out there--financial information, weather information, corporate information--on databases, spreadsheets, and websites that you can read but you can't manipulate. The key thing is that this data exists, but the computers don't know what it is and how it interrelates. You can't write programs to use it.
IMHO, the problem with the Semantic Web is the same problem that evolved the Web from a linked knowledge store to a commercial-driven directory.
Yes, it would be nice if all data were tagged and understandable, but let's be honest: the commercialization (and its result: exploitation by marketers) of the web would certainly spill into the Semantic Web, and so Berners-Lee's vision would be once again ruined by 1) incorrect/misleading tagging, 2) competing standards and 3) out and out fraud.
I assume what Berners-Lee really wants is for a machine to truly understand that, using his example: something is a calendar, and that you are interetsed in it, and that you should add the event to your schedule and then book a flight for it.
But the chances are -- one day -- machines will be able to understand how data is typed by understanding the context around it (just as a human would go through the aforementioned process manually).
Obviously, this type of reading "comprehension" is a long ways off, but the "search engine wars" are resulting in a lot of mind power thrown at the problem of understand context. And I'm guessing it'll be a reality before anything as pure as the vision for the Semantic Web is realized.
(and to throw in a plug for my own copmaniy's attempt at understanding web context: theConcept).
I've been hearing noise about the semantic web, RDF, and what not for years now, and every time I do, the first thing that pops into my head is "Second System Effect".
He got lucky once, because he put together some tools that were simple and straightforward enough for people to pick it up quickly, thereby avoiding the fate of the dozens of other hypertext systems going back to the late 1980's.
Now, like all second systems, he wants to "do it right", over-engineering away all of the things that made the first one take off ...
Just my opinionated rant ...
the Semantic Web is a publishing medium; the creation of content is left to the will of the publishers (ideally the creation of metadata should be computer-assisted, but there are other possibilities). Your "second problem" is precisely what the S.W. is intended to solve; it doesn't require people to agree in the data format, everybody can define their own.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
So, after reading the main article for this story as well as the one for a previous slashdot story on this subject, I guess that I can add the following meta tags for some of the items in my website, www.clearplastic.com. I don't yet know the syntax for these memantic meta tags; I am but taking a guess:
.
semantic "Clear Plastic" = "waterproof, transparent, see-through, air-tight, shows-beauty,
protective">
. . . .
And so forth. Can this lead to 'semantic spamming?' I have only just begun for one of my
two sites. I can see where this can get way out of control. Someone goes to clearplastic.com who lives in a rainy climate area. One of the semantics could say that a clear plastic raincoat is a required item. If someone's computer is set up so that it automaticaly purchases something that is required; I consider this scamming.
Cleara
it's both informative and insightful.
The "Semantic Web" is already being done in a quite sophisticated manner by computational linguists. The major stumbling block: money. It takes a lot of time (and hence, money) to build these systems and no one seems to appreciate the possible impact.
You don't want a "single" web... You want a multitude of them, and carefully isolate them (beyond normal information reading and referencing).
This horrible monoculture is what's happening to the web right now! A new web browser called FireFox is conspiring with the evil W3C to propagate its agenda of paving over the current safely incompatible WWW with the data duopoly of XHTML and CSS. If they succeed in their nefarious motives, all the markup on the web will adhere to ONE draconian standard!
Seriously, man. Monocultures are a GOOD thing for standards, but a bad thing for implementations of those standards. I expect that once the standards that make up the Semantic Web become solidified, we'll see multiple implementations popping up.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
The AC submitter chose to smuggle the little "altruism=good" gem into the article, and michael let him get away with it. Clearly not many people noticed, but undeniably the seed was planted, if you are equating "donating $1.000.000.000 to the world" with "a good man".
See, the difference?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The rest of us call this... GOOGLE.
Google searches undifferentiated text. In contrast, the semantic web is all about differentiating text by adding meta tags.
For example, the word "Hilton" on a web page is ambiguous. It could be a hotel, or a celebrity. Which is it? With the semantic web we'd know:
Of course, this is a fairly trivial example. A more meaningful example:
- Jim is 24601
- Jim is 15931
- Account 24601 is online gaming
- 24601 cheats and scams
- Account 15931 is online banking
- 15931 has made 450 transactions this month
- 15931 has a positive balance
Thus, when Jim is passing me a check...- Jim has enough to cover this check, has made 450 transactions, but is known to cheat and scam
Incomplete, but technically correct picture of Jim. The bad part has no relavence to me, unless I'm selling him an item in an online game. The symantic web has no way of telling what's relavent to me in a given situation.Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
People can't bother making their pages w3c complaint (even slashdot)
You can complain all you like to W3C, they won't make Slashdot compliant. For Slashdot to become compliant, first of all it has to want to become compliant. Well, before that, there has to be standards to comply to, and W3C has given us those.
But did you know that Slashdot isn't the only web site? Tens of millions of web sites are W3C compliant or close enough that the web functions.
That is a great achievement by W3C.
For semantic web to gain adoption, there has to be benefits and then the infrastructure has to be built. We have a clear view of the benefits already, but only part of the infrastructure.
The part that exists - TCP/IP is going great.
The part that doesn't exist yet - a fully standards compliant web browser - isn't being funded by any of the companies that can afford to implement it because they already have cash cow franchises.
But the semantic web creates new opportunities, and when the old men who capitalized on earlier opportunities are dead or retired or superceded, the semantic web will emerge.
...The Semantic Web, where everyone speaks esperanto and the Java is free!
Har!
"The entire sciences community thinks that Artificial Intelligence is a joke, which is why nobody (except for Minsky) with any real credibility in the field is studying it. Other computer approaches are being researched, but they aren't anything like AI because you can't expect mind-bogglingly complex causal models to automatically form reasoning systems correctly."
Your last sentence is spot-on in either context.
Sir Tim (he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in July)
There are some who call me....Tim?
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Check out DataLibre: "Own Your Data, Write Once - Read Everywhere"
Next problem: Marc Andreesen releases "his" Mosaic web browser? He was hardly the sole author of that code.
Why we're going to reinvent Prolog and take 20 years doing it.
In the beginning, we had library card catalogs, with their painful attempts to index and cross-reference books. That works well in some areas, typically ones where names of people are significant. Attempts to apply the same approaches to technical papers worked less well.
There's a very elaborate classification system for patents. When you had to look through patents on paper or microfilm, it was essential. Now that we have full text search, it's used less and less.
A modern example of this approach is the ACM Taxonomy, a structure into which all computer science can be fitted. (As an exercise, try to put the current Slashdot stories into that taxonomy.) Nobody actually uses that taxonomy to find anything.
As to data interchangability, that's a separate issue, and more of a standards one. The big problem for publicly available data is that the cost of encoding the data is borne by different people than those who benefit from the encoding. Many companies don't like having all their product and pricing information easily searchable by price. (Froogle may change this, because Google has so much clout.)
I've spent some time dealing with public financial reporting. There's opposition to detailed disclosure in a standardized format. Many companies don't want their detailed information to be too easily analyzed. Embarassing results show up.
The future is better search engines, not user-created indexing data. As we've painfully learned, a search engine must look at the same data a human reader would, or it will be lied to. Lied to to the point of uselessness.
Trust is one of the major stumbling blocks of semantic applications and automatic knowledge management issues.
If you have followed this little crazy guy that is me, you may have seen that most of today's computer problems are because modern operating systems offer nothing in the information management department.
3 47565
1 99083
Remember the CVS story a couple of days before? it's information management: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=123076&cid=10
WinFS is also about information management: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=121101&cid=10
The story that the Evolution e-mail client offers the e-mail data as a data model separate from the application? another information management issue.
The web? information management issue.
Distributed databases? information management issue.
Web search engines? information management issue.
Windows search tool? information management issue.
The Windows registry? information management issue.
The unix etc directory? information management issue.
Enterprise workflows? again, an information management issue. That's why there is no general workflow solution accepted and used worldwide.
Dynamic web site contents? information management issue.
The semantic web? another information management issue!
As you can see, from the numerous examples given above, all that an operating system should do, but no one does, is that it must manage information instead of files. If that is coupled with a distributed networked environment, 90% of the world's software would be considered obsolete overnight and the productivity and fun from using computers will increase 10fold.
If any open source developer is reading this, you may contact me for a private discussion on the idea. THIS IS OPEN SOURCE'S BIGGEST CHANCE TO LEAD THE TECHNOLOGICAL RACE!
As you do note in your comments, however, it's not really doable without a good simulation of conceptual processing.
Still, every little bit helps. Certainly a "Semantic Web" would be more useful than the current one.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Hmm what he was describing sounds a lot like XML/XSLT. I wonder if his work is taking that into account??
The semantic web sounds a little like a massively distributed Prolog program, with each separate semweb component defining a rule or relation, and each semweb-aware program just being a query into the environment... Other questions: how do you avoid redundancies, or pulling data you don't want, or keeping data confined to specific locales or interpretations, or keeping labels synced with the actual data? What prevents someone from declaring something foo when it's actually bar?
You can get semantic markup to work : (1) within a group of dedicated volunteers who understand and care about it; (2) within a large organization, where the ontology can be forcibly standardized, and it's use can be dictated.
Getting it to work out on the Web as We Know It has so many problems, it's kind of crazy... Even if you can skip past the problems of deceptiveness (let's say by authentication and strong laws against fraud) Much of the information that's published is advertising supported. Where's the incentive to mark that information up with semantic tags so that people can skip passed the ads? It's hard to see how you can get to semantic web heaven without some kind of automated micro-payment system.
Clay Shirky argues that the semantic web is all about syllogisms, and then goes on how syllogisms are not very useful, as they can lead to wrong conclusions. I don't think the semantic web is, or even should be, about syllogisms. I think it is merely about storing information in a way that is meaningful.
As an example of how the semantic web could work, consider the following snippet of code:
(person
(name "John" "Doe")
(gender male)
(email "john@doe.net"))
This is clearly meaningful to humans, but not immediately meaningful to machines. If, however, one writes programs that interpret and process the data here represented, the data becomes "meaningful" to machines. Such programs become more useful the larger the data set on which they operate becomes.
The semantic web, then, will be realized by standardizing the way data is represented (like HTML does for documents, but more agressively), so that data from various sources can be processed by standard software. This is immensely useful; think about search engines that really let you find documents that discuss certain issues, rather than just matching words you type in against everything in the document.
Whether all of this takes off remains to be seen, but I disagree with the notion that the semantic web would not be useful.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Either the meta-data is encoded by hand, in which case it's faulty, prone to error, and susceptible to fraud, or the meta-data is encoded by a machine, in which case there's no need for a "semantic web" just an automated "semantic interpreter" that will interpret pages on the fly.
I mean really, Berners-Lee is just picking up John Wilkins' old saw-horse of a Philosophical Language from about 400 years ago. Philosophers of various stature have been picking up and dropping pieces of it ever since, and it's never caught on in all that time. Perhaps there's a reason for that.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
for data to be shared and recognized as distinct fields of information, won't there need to be standardization across all hosts in order to use the data in any comprehensible way?
ie. on host #1while on host #2 the same item is recognized as:
how will the semantic web describe and relate items which are recognized as an item for sale but under different labels?
The self-promoting, ever-insistent, look-at-me, look-at-me inventor of hypertext, the world, and everything?
The Sematic Web is nothing more or less than the "Big Plan" as Daniel Burnham Lambert (an architect) "Make no small plans, they have not the power to stir men's blood" (maybe not quite exact quote). The Semantic Web is where all of those unemployed AI weenies from the 80's have migrated, and have foisted off scheme/lisp and rule-based systems as well as all of the baggage from symbolic AI onto the unsuspecting new generation of programmers. It is sort of like nuclear fusion, "We'll have it in 20 years" --said 40 years ago and still repeated.
Here's how to do it properly.
How to Build a Semantic Web
Terms:
A "DOCUMENT" is a piece of information/site/etc.
A "SOCIETY" is an arbitrary groups of people and their DOCUMENTs
"QUALITY" is a value (computed similar to Google's PageRank) for a particular DOCUMENT, according to a particular SOCIETY.
"SEMANTIC NODES" link together to constitute a "SEMANTIC GRAPH", composing a global neural network of concepts. Each SOCIETY can emphsize and de-emphasize various features and connections of this GRAPH.
"SEMANTICS" are weighted (by the author) bindings between a DOCUMENT and a SEMANTIC NODE.
The key concepts that complete the picture are:
1. VALUE is contextually dependent on the SOCIETY(s) you are currently in. E.g. Doctors will emphasize medical aspects of breasts differently than pornographers.
2. SEMANTIC VALUE is a derivative property found by taking the full VALUE of a DOCUMENT and spreading it among all of its weighted SEMANTIC BINDINGS (that's the key right there that prevents authorial abuse/semantic SPAM).
And then that's it. It just works. I plug into some set of societies (again, weighted), and I inherit their combined SEMANTIC GRAPH and VALUE assessments of documents. Then each document has SEMANTIC VALUE relevant to me. And a big powerful search engine pulls it all together. Whoever builds that search engine will create and own the emergent global consciousness.
I can imagine being forced to weight the "Tricon Global Food Corp Society" with a minimum of of 10% weight whenever I access information through the "free" WiFi network in my local Taco Bell!
That addresses the *access* side of such a global network (and it's a scary thought), but what about who actually owns the data? Preserving the network in a serverless P2P format could make it truly free AND *extremely* fault-tolerant.
In this way, various subgroups could actually charge for access to their SOCIETY subnet. Charging either money, or again, forced weighting. For example, to subscribe to the "KPWR R&B Music Appreciators" SOCIETY subnet (which would allow searches for "usher" to return the musician rather than the guy who finds your seat at a show), you might be required to accept a minimum weight of 5% in the "Seagram's Party People" (their sponsor) SOCIETY subnet. So now you can find "usher", but if you search for "mixed drink recipes", you'll get a lot of pages recommending Seagram's brand alcohol as a base for your drinks.
As long as this is *transparent* (i.e. I can see how my weights are being set and the dependencies, and I can remove ones I don't like), this doesn't strike me as that horrible.
Marking up Hilton as <motel> or <celebrity> is all very well. This is what XML is for.
One of the key points behind the semantic web is to define meanings to your meta tags. My system has a <partnumber> tag and so does yours, but that doesn't mean they're the same. I can publish my definition of <partnumber> so that other apps can know how to interpret my partnumbers. Complex definitions can be provided in computer-readable format, which can then be looked up, referenced, shared etc. with other systems.
Take Dublin Core, for example. A standard set of tags to describe document attributes, such as title and author. Why should I write my own <author> tag when I can simply pull-in part of Dublin Core's vocabulary. Not only does that save me (the developer) time, but it means any app that knows about Dublin Core will know what I mean when I say "author". Or, if an app doesn't know about a particular term it can simply go look it up.
Sharing vocabularies is time-saving, but also helps computers process information automatically. Mr Berners-Lee and some colleagues had a good article published in Scientific American a while ago which explains their vision of intelligent software agents doing the sorts of things computers should be doing with the information the web has to offer. Such as automatically adjusting your schedule if your gym's online timetable has changed and your squash game needs to be moved. OK, that's a very basic example, but the point is that although the information needed to do this sort of stuff is already on the web, it is currently only readable by humans.
If anyone is interested in learning more about this stuff then have a look at the Resource Description Framework (RDF) which is a foundation technology of the Semantic Web (There's more to it than HTML META tags!). There's a lot of activity involving RDF-based technologies such as OWL, FOAF and the popular RSS.
My life is one big siesta in which I'm dreaming I wished my life was one big siesta.
You mean, I'd be able to track down the snotty little uber 1337 haxxor d00d who thinks KS'ing in the Geo Caves is the essence of being an Imp rather than being a punk? Who equates poor spelling with role-playing? Who thinks he know something about computers just because he's had one for all of his 13 years of life?
I'm all for it! WOOT!!
I'll take what you're saying a step farther. If Berners-Lee had tried to make the web proprietary, the NCSA never would have written Mosaic, the IMG tag would be on hold for years, and something else would have been developed and grabbed everybody's interest. Nobody outside of CERN would ever hear about the WWW.
How do I "contact you for a private discussion"? I have traid to design infrmation management down on disk and memory management on a OS once. It has lots of problems. The worse are like this NAME and PERSON_NAME stuff, that no system can certanly link but must be linked in order to communicate different (not necessary relational)databases. I could start designing the OS, but a computer with it was unable to comunicate.
So, if you have some ideas, I am very interested in listening. But don't you think this will "lead the tecnology race". An OS like this is surely very new and interesting but widely adoption is very unlikely (think about all the X subistitutes).
Rethinking email
I couldn't agree with the parent more.
I'm genuinely suprised that there hasn't been more inroads into trust chain architecture. The current web works because it requires people to get the semantics - and people are good at working out whether or not they trust a source.
There is a logical seperation between authors. With the semantic web, everything is presented together. How do you know if you can trust it? How do you know that all authors are presenting data the way it is?
What if they just interpret the data differently?
Well, you could try addressing the trust issue using semantic web notions as well... You could create a semantic link between your slashdot profile and a document that you recommend, or the profile of the person who wrote it (hey you could even call it "moderation"). And then somebody else could create a "recommendation" link between him/herself and your profile, etc... You could obtain a rating for each document, using an inference engine that would follow a FOAF chain.
Just like TBL said, it's the network effect that makes the semantic web powerful. Trust evaluation can also leverage such an effect, as Slashdot has been able to demonstrate.
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
My e-mail is axilmar@in.gr. Just send me an e-mail there, then we can have a discussion.
YO MASTER P Not sure how to get in touch with you for an offline discussion. Feel free to email me at gregdeocampo@gmail.com , perhaps we can have an interesting conversation! best, greg
/* http://www.gregdeocampo.com */