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On Finding Semantic Web Documents
Anonymous Coward writes "A research group at University of Maryland has published a blog describing the latest approach for finding and indexing Semantic Web Documents. They have published it in reaction to Peter Norvig's (director of search quality at Google) view on the Semantic Web (Semantic Web Ontologies: What Works and What Doesn't): 'A friend of mine [from UMBC] just asked can I send him all the URLs on the web that have dot-RDF, dot-OWL, and a couple other extensions on them; he couldn't find them all. I looked, and it turns out there's only around 200,000 of them. That's about 0.005% of the web. We've got a ways to go.'"
What about all the pages that are .rss but are actually rss 1.0, those are rdf-based. And what about all the rdf which is in the comments of .html files and others? My creative commons license is rdf, but its inside a .html file. Sure, we do have a long ways to go, but the semantic web is bigger than a few file extensions findable by google.
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Semantic web stuff if cool and all but I honestly don't believe that it will ever really take off in any meaningful way. For one, it takes a paradigm that people know and understand and adds a lot of complexity to it, both on the user end and the engineering end.
Plus a lot of the rah-rah booster club that's grown up around it sound a whole lot like the Royal Society folks in Quicksilver who keep trying to catalog everything in the world into a 'natural' organization.
What it basically comes down to for me is that it seems like a great framework for single-topic information organization but at a point we need to keep our focus on the actual content of what we're producing more than the packaging. For this to be ready for prine time the value proposition needs to move from a 30-minute explanation involving diagrams and made-up words ending in '-sphere' to something even less than an "elevator pitch" like 2 sentences.