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Challenging the Ideas Behind the Semantic Web

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the there-isn't-any-deception-on-the-internet dept.

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."

2 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Semantic web is currently fragile technology by UR30 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Web of Trust by VDM · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.