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Tim Berners-Lee Discusses the Future of the Web
maximus1 writes "In an interview with IT World, Tim Berners-Lee explains his vision of the Semantic Web. He says: 'The Semantic Web is going to take off particularly when we see people using it for data processing, when we see people using it in more and more things, adding personal data, adding files to government data.' His position on net neutrality: 'We've seen cable companies trying to prevent using the Internet for Internet phones. I am concerned about this, and am working, with many other committed people, to keep it from happening. I think it's very important to keep an open Internet for whoever you are. This is called Net neutrality. It's very important to preserve Net neutrality for the future.' And a fun tidbit — He mentions his 1989 memo to his boss at CERN that described his vision for the Web."
...another "Tim Berners-Lee discusses the semantic web" article.
I predict that, in the future, the web will be used to for vast amounts of pornography, insane conspiricy theories, niche interest "news" sites that protect their users from anything that might challenge their worldview and to allow regular people to flourish in the utter jackassery that results from anonymity.
It will also have an interesting side effect where long-time users sit down to write a post intended to be humorous and end up making themselves a little depressed.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
At best, nobody gives a damn.
Businesses actively work to prevent other sites from scraping content. They certainly aren't going to spend extra effort to support it!
Users care about presentation. Looks are everything. Web developers know this, or at least the marketing people in charge of web design know it.
- No one will ever figure out what Tim Berners-Lee is rambling on about with the semantic Web thingie.
- The Net will continue to feature more video, become even more interactive, and the difference between local apps and the Internet will continue to be blurred little-by-little.
- Blogs will continue in various fashions, from vlogs (video blogs) to audlogs (audio logs) to iBlogs (blogs with highly-interactive content, including even 3D simulated environments). Apple will sue the first person that uses the term 'iBlog'.
- Devices will continue to converge. Specialized devices will exist, and regular desktop and laptop computers will continue to exist, but the differences between them will blur as it becomes apparent that the only difference from a practical standpoint will be form factor and user interface.
- The telcos will become less relevant as Net connectivity becomes all that matters.
- THe mafiaa becomes irrelevant as people become increasingly connected to artists.
- Spam will become ever increasingly more annoying as advertising will even start popping up on your roll of toilet 'paper'.
My blog
Sure - life would be so much easier if everyone spoke the same language and all businesses worked together for a common good. And everyone used Linux and open standards and shared data. But, then again, any structured approach would work well in this environment or in other closed communities where everyone agrees on XML and API standards already.
But give me something to work with the vast amounts of unstructured information out there - not just the generic header information surrounding the really interesting stuff. I'm just hoping that Web 3.0 focuses more on this area to support a real information revolution rather than just over-formatting the already semi-structured pieces of data that we already know about.
In spirit, I see commonality between Larry Lessig's desire to build a commons of information that can be shared and built on, and Tim Berners-Lee's desire to build a a platform for data integration that people can build new applications on. For all of my enthusiasm for the semantic web (I have had RDF meta data on my web site for many years), there are some tough problems, including:
1. trust: how do we keep people from publishing purposefully wrong meta data?
2. how do we reason with a web's worth of data? Even with recent advances in technology for descriptive logic reasoner's, reasoning with web scale data is not even close to being possible. Even the RDF extracted from Wikipedia is way too large to reason over.
3. tension between formal standards and "grass roots" bottom up approaches that work, but may not scale. I expect that some "grass roots" efforts will become very popular and perhaps replace RDF and OWL as the semantic web data model. Speaking of which, one of my favorite ideas that I have seen widely discussed: extending HTML/XHTML so that meta data is encoded in standardized attribute names representing agreement/disagreement, trust level, type of linked information, time stamp, etc. Combine this with RDF, but have a better way to embed RDF into HTML and XHTML.
Yes. And if there's one person in the world who understands what networks mean, the name of this person is Bob Metcalfe. I'm sure anything he has to predict about the future of the Internet MUST be right.
The semantic web is being invented now. Only not by Tim Berners Lee et al. The W3C has been side tracked for quite some time by this semantic web thing. Time has been wasted on pointless things such as XHTML, RDF, OWL, etc. Outside the labs, in the real world, a lot more progress is being made. There's millions of geotagged photos, places, wikipedia articles, etc. You can search for hcalendar events on Yahoo, hresumes on linked in, people on facebook and pictures of cats on flickr. Social networks are all about meta information. These applications are now starting to link and integrate each other. That effectively is the birth of the semantic web. It will be a heterogenous patchwork of information applications and services.
If you want a glimpse of what the semantic web will look like, fire up Google Earth. Sure it is proprietary but it is also massively distributed meta information from all over the internet aggregated into one coherent view overlayed on top of the world. Imagine that based on open standards, and you get an idea of where we could be going.
Emerging standards such as microformats, atom, openid may lack the glamour of all encompassing ontologies and the mighty AI of reasoning engines and what not. But, the bottom line is that they are a hell of a lot more practical and pragmatic, solve real problems, and you can use them right now. These emerging standards are not perfect or even complete but people are definitely using them to enrich information on the internet by cross referencing; by tagging; by labeling etc. Defacto standardization outside W3C by killer applications is driving this lower case semantic web. The best thing the W3C could do and currently does not is to endorse, facilitate and promote this work.
Tim Berners Lee of course contributed his bit by inventing the web browser + very naive markup language (aka HTML 1.0) in 1989. I give him credit for his vision then but this article reads like a very confused mix of ideals and vague concepts and does not seem visionary at all. The man tries to explain things in terms of databases, files and links and somehow the wizards at MIT are going to provide the magic pixie dust that turns it into something beautiful. That's nice but the how part remains ever elusive.
Jilles