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Why the Semantic Web Will Fail
Jack Action writes "A researcher at Canada's National Research Council has a provocative post on his personal blog predicting that the Semantic Web will fail. The researcher notes the rising problems with Web 2.0 — MySpace blocking outside widgets, Yahoo ending Flickr identities, rumors Google will turn off its search API — and predicts these will also cripple Web 3.0." From the post: "The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating. There is no way they: (1) would agree on web standards (hah!) (2) would adopt a common vocabulary (you don't say) (3) would reliably expose their APIs so anyone could use them (as if)."
Just not true. For one thing, Google's results are much too noisy. For another, it relies on keywords occurring on pages, and that's rather primitive (it's not always trivial to find good keywords, and even then you might miss the one page your were looking for because they used a synonym or misspelled it).
But the most important reason is that it would be much cooler to have a web where you could say "give me a list of all the goals scored by Romario" and have it list them for me. I don't care about pages, I want information, answers to questions. That's what the Semantic Web is supposed to be a first mini step for.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
But there are three ways to get that.
1) A search service that indexes all of Romario's goals.
2) A manually built asset that aggregates all of Romario's goals.
3) A standard system of semantic tags that self-identifies all Romario goal assets.
#1 is Google. As you point out now it relies primarily on keywords but you oversell the problem in two ways. First of all most video hosting sites already provide author and/or community tagging--thus providing a way for keywords to be assigned. Second, you're comparing a future semantic Web against the Google of today.
#2 can be provided by commercial video companies now ("1,000 Great Man U Goals," etc). It's also possible that a fan site could do the manual labor to find, upload, and keyword the videos.
#3 is the "semantic Web" approach, wherein all content providers follow a standard for self-identifying their content in a computer-parsable way.
The thing that distinguishes 1 and 2 from 3 is the scope of work required. #1 and #2 rely on a small team of dedicated people to accomplish the task. #3 relies on a very broad group of people of varying levels of dedication.
If you're talking practically about the solution, none of those approaches are going to to get to 100%. As others have pointed out there is a real human semantic problem in identifying which goals of Romario to count, how far back to look, etc.
But the key is that #1 and #2 are approaches of a scope that we know can work. #3 seems unlikely to get the buy-in and effort required.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.