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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."
The Semantic Web has been a reality for years, used for individual projects assumptions can be made about the data coming in. See Visualising the Semantic Web ed. Geroimeno and Chen (Springer-Verlag, 2005) for tonnes of real-world examples, and the book's even reached a second edition from further examplary work being done. Just because high-schoolers on MySpace users aren't sending valid RDF back and forth amongst themselves doesn't mean that the concepts behind the Semantic Web haven't already been implemented to the benefit of other projects.
Net Neutrality should be an Amendment to Constitution.
The reason why? Because as in amendment it would be the only way to protect the internet against a political party taking over and changing everything, and then other parties making the freedom of the internet a political football. One year the internet could be free, then the next it could be not free, then the next... would be a guess depending on how much money the cable and telephone companies can spend to keep their "keep the internet not free" canidates in office...!!!
A constitutional amendment needs to be put through a 2/3rds vote process (something that 2/3rds of the citizens would approve of)... then to undo the amendment you would need 2/3rds again to undo it... this would be difficult to do (meaning that freedom of the internet could be protected the same as "free speech" "freedom of the press" and other natural and expected freedoms (for "free" countries).
Later in this thread I posted about the semantic desktop being part of a new Linux release. Unfortunately I was incoherent and seemed offtopic. However I replied to myself somewhat more intelligently in an attempt to clarify.
I'm basically theorizing that with KDE and Mozilla, among many others, combining to support the Semantic Desktop and web; with Apple having implemented KDE code in Dashboard and Safari and working with them, the Semantic Web has a chance to at least be tried. One day Opera and IE will seek to support it after Mac and KDE have it on their Desktops and on the web!
Not really.
You're talking about OLE, where Microsoft only allowed the combination and transfer of data objects (and otherwise reusing application code) from one application to another. You could take an Excel worksheet and paste it into a Word document. That's pretty cool, and at useful once in a long while, but it's hardly smart enough to be compared to Semantic Web. The web equivalent is simply embedding images and Flash games- i.e. Web 1.0.
At work I get many emails about upcoming internal conferences, tech talks, vendor presentations and such. They all come in the form of an Outlook email, but contain data including event title, date/time, location, and more recognizable bits of information. But when I drag the email onto a calendar folder to create a "Meeting" object, none of the data is put in the appropriate fields. That's the kind of thing Semantic Web is supposed do.
The stuff Microsoft had was useful, but it's obsolete today. It only provided the ability to share data between one application and another application. Today we need to share data between any of millions of applications (web sites), and we can't afford to write dedicated code for each one of those. We need the Semantic Web.
> Achieving it for 'stuff' in general, which seems to be the aim of the Semantic Web, is probably flat-out impossible.
"Ingenuity and resourcefulness" my foot. You don't even make an argument against it, not to mention any attempt at proof. Since don't even understand what the Semantic Web is about, how could you possibly dismiss it so casually?
But I must stop and thank you. Pessimists like you make us real technologists so much cooler. It's great to hear people say "it can't be done," because it makes solving those problems so much sweeter. My prediction: expect some serious in-your-face fist-pumping.
So lets create a 5-tuple with (date, place,event,persons,data)
Well an event already has a place and a time/date associated with it. So we have (#event -> #time -> "11am") and (#event -> #place -> "Meeting Hall). So all you are left with for saying that a person is attending/did attend is another relationship, (#person -> #attend -> #event). So you've expressed the information in a series of relationships between two entities - which is exactly what RDF does. Suddenly you don't need your new OEDF format, you just need RDF and software that understands the relationships #time, #place and #attend. OEDF software also needs to understand these concepts, but it also needs to solve the data format problem. It's more code to write.
The trouble with the Semantic Web is that TBL is always talking about the end goal. The end goal seems unobtainable to many people. But the way the Semantic Web is working, it's solving one small problem at a time (such as the representation of generic relationships, with RDF) in a general way, which means that everybody can build on that foundation, have less code to write, and can spend their time solving bigger problems.. Now eventually we might get much smarter software, but the Semantic Web is quite sensibly solving a little bit at a time.