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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.
And a fun tidbit -- He mentions his 1989 memo to his boss at CERN that described his vision for the Web.
That vision is nonsense. I don't see any Web 2.0 buzzwords on that paper anywhere.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
- 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
For a second there I thought he said Symantec Web and said to myself "We're all doomed."
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.
Businesses actively work to prevent other sites from scraping content. They certainly aren't going to spend extra effort to support it!
... Have you ever heard of RSS feeds? Cutting edge companies ARE already supporting this, including giants like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
Give me a break
In fact, Google is a model here. They are making it ridiculously easy to get access to data in all kinds of formats. I can create a google spreadsheet and actually share individual cells and ranges of cells with anyone else on the internet, and it even retains the dynamic calculations from the main spreadsheet even when you aren't displaying the rest of the cells. It's actually ridiculously cool if you think about it.
The smart companies absolutely will make it easier and easier to access their data in all kinds of formats.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
These user-driven efforts are where the tagging and semantic web will probably start. If Wikipedia contributors care to take the time to write good articles, then surely they will also be willing to semantically tag articles. (In fact Wikipedia already has alot of semantic tagging.) Similarly creative commons artists are actively tagging their works with machine-readable creative-commons tags. Social sites like Flickr are also doing alot of useful tagging.
So businesses may resist it... but as long as users care about it (and are given easy to tools to make it happen--like wikis), then this semantic web can be created. Once it expands, businesses will have to play along or risk being left behind and ignored by the web-users who come to depend upon the power of the Semantic Web. So, whether they like it or not, businesses will have to connect to the semantic web and add to its descriptive power, or else they will lose all their customers.
And, yes, I'm keenly aware of the flip-side, which is that businesses will then try to commoditize and monetize these technologies, sometimes in bad ways, like Spam. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. But I don't think businesses will be able to stop it.
I disagree. Or rather, I think that describes only some users. There are plenty of users who are care about content. (Wikipedia and free software are examples of the resultant projects.) So even if many (or most) users don't care about the semantic web, as long as some dedicated group does care, then it will expand and everyone (including users who don't care about the underlying implementation details) will benefit.
Okay I forgot to say that by "this" I mean semantic desktop, which would naturally be related to Tim Berners-Lee's prediction of the future including the semantic web.
I was typing two things at once and only proofread for typos. Not coherence unfortunately.
Basically, while not challenging OSX or Windows, KDE4 has a lot of users realative to the number of users who would normally be involved in implementing semantic anything.
At the same time as the semantic desktop will be available, the functionality will be compatible with Mozilla (Firefox Web Browser) and their XUL (an XML implementation for their User Interface.)
I wasn't trying to promote KDE4, which is months away, or Mandriva, which I don't use. It's just really cool for those of us who've been looking forward to a semantic web where words will have more meaning. It seems like it might start with KDE users and as it grows spread to Firefox. And since the crucial parts of Apple's Safari and Dashboard are Open Source and based on KDE code, Mac users may be included in on this fairly quickly.
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.
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.
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