Challenging the Ideas Behind the Semantic Web

mytrip writes to tell us that after a recent presentation to the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Tim Berners-Lee was challenged by fellow Google exec Peter Norvig citing some of the many problems behind the Semantic Web. From the article: "'What I get a lot is: "Why are you against the Semantic Web?" I am not against the Semantic Web. But from Google's point of view, there are a few things you need to overcome, incompetence being the first,' Norvig said. Norvig clarified that it was not Berners-Lee or his group that he was referring to as incompetent, but the general user."

Comments

Re:Googlebombing

[QuantumFTL]

Google does not extract any semantics from content. It merely analyses the linking between websites and connects that with keywords. No semantics here.

I believe you are referring to PageRank, which is one of many algorithms used by google to determine search relevance. This article discusses their use of Latent Semantic Indexing, which is a somewhat crude but effective form of sematic inference which is widely used in the field of NLP.

Sem Web, meet Chicken & Egg

[AlXtreme]

The semantic web is, in my eyes, a typical chicken & egg problem. You've got loads of content on one side, yet current search engines work well enough to not worry about representing that content in a structured way in a markup language like OWL. On the other side, you've got embarassingly few semantic web applications that use structured content. How is a typical web developer going to justify structuring the content on his side if he can't point to an example how it could improve shareholder value? What would exporting our databases in OWL currently solve?

True, the web had a similar problem, however creating a webpage is a lot more interesting (you see the results directly, how terrible they might be you do see a result) than structuring data. The latter takes a lot more work, and the direct benefit just isn't there.

Sem-Web-like standards like RSS, XML and SOAP have become mainstream, but primarily because they fill a gap. The adoption of RDF or OWL simply doesn't solve anything. Yet. It would be cool to let agents loose onto the semantic web and retrieve them together with a summary on a certain subject using a multitude of sources, but as long as it's easier to Google I don't think it would generate any interest outside academia.

Feel free to prove me wrong though.