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Semantic Web Under Suspicion
Dr Occult writes "Much of the talk at the 2006 World Wide Web conference has been about the technologies behind the so-called semantic web. The idea is to make the web intelligent by storing data such that it can be analyzed better by our machines, instead of the user having to sort and analyze the data from search engines. From the article: 'Big business, whose motto has always been time is money, is looking forward to the day when multiple sources of financial information can be cross-referenced to show market patterns almost instantly.' However, concern is also growing about the misuses of this intelligent web as an affront to privacy and security."
I've been trying to look for practical applications of Semantic Web. Can't find them anywhere. So far, what W3C proposes is a very high-level language. Of course, DAML,OWL... have nice features like cardinality constraints, axioms and so so forth. The idea is to build more logic into webpages. This is all theory. In practice, I don't really see how this will help making the web smarter. You can't expect people to write OWL by hand--like in the early days of HTML. We still lack an automated way of building taxonomies, and deriving the document's context and logical links with all other WWW documents. That's anyway the purpose of search engines, and so far Google is doing a pretty nice job at it. The next step is to build The Inference Engine, moving closer to A.I. Obviously we're not there yet. I think People who have the answer to this would reach the holy grail of computing. Not too mention being super rich!