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

Semantic web is currently fragile technology

[UR30]

The current semantic web seems to offer a technology too fragile to use on the global scale. The complexity of various classification and ontological schemes, work needed to provide the metadata etc. Also, semantic web seems to offer great opporturnities for spammers and other mischief makers. Now we already have comment and reference spamming, but semantic web (on the global scale) raises the possibilities enormously.

Re:Problems w/ the Semantic Web

[CRCulver]

...is the users. Not the ones searching but the ones creating the content.

Sure, the technical limitations of Joe Public might slow the growth of the Semantic Web on the whole, but what few people realize is that the Semantic Web has already existed for years in in-house or limited-audience networks. Just look at FOAFnaut (an update in a few weeks will return it to full usability) or the very much real-world examples in Geroimenko & Chen's Visualizing the Semantic Web (Springer, 2005).

Web of Trust

[VDM]

In one of the very first papers mentioning the Semantic Web, some paragraph was devoted to something then lost in the hype around the semantic web: the Web of trust, which had to be something like a certification of metadata. This is perhaps to be again regarded as important for the semantic web and the web in general (although not easy to manage).
By the way, Norvig is not only a Google exec, but also a well known AI researcher, author of one of most important books on that subject.

Norvig's personal project

[tfinniga]

Slightly offtopic. Peter Norvig gave a talk at my university on similar topics, and there was a short Q&A afterwards.

One of the students asked him what he did for his 20% project. He said that he was usually too busy keeping tabs on what the other employees were doing with their 20% time, so he didn't quite get around to working on his. He told us what he wanted to do, as motivation for himself.

The basic idea is that when he used to work for NASA, it'd always make him upset when people saw faces in random spots on the moon's terrain, and claimed it was aliens that NASA was covering up, or similar. So, he was planning on taking facial recognition software and running it on all of google earth. I think it'd be pretty awesome..
Any progress yet, Mr. Norvig? I'd love to see the results.. :)