The Semantic Web Going Mainstream

Jamie found a story about a new web tool that is trying to break ground into the semantic web. It's called twine, and it supposedly will intelligently aggregate your data, be it youtube videos, emails, or whatever you accumulate in your travels. Not the first, not the last, but here's hoping something comes out of the ideas someday.

Comments

Sorry, but it's not for me.

[AltGrendel]

Twine is a website where people can dump information that's important to them, from strings of e-mails to YouTube videos.

I really don't like this idea. One good hack from the Russian MAFIA and the game would be over. All your eggs are belong to us, as it were.

Re:Sorry, but it's not for me.

[butterwise]

Sorry, but it's not for me.

Anti-semantic...

Re:Sorry, but it's not for me.

[UbuntuDupe]

Okay, that is *not* fair. The Semantic Web would have untold benefits for humanity. For example: if you wanted to find out which Major League batter had the most RBIs in 1997, you would have to spend three -- perhaps four -- minutes learning how to use an internet search engine.

With the Berners-Lee Semantic Web(tm), however, you would just type in "which Major League batter had the most RBIs in 1997?"

(Of course, most search engines will already pick out the relevant terms even if you typed that question in, but that doens't count because they don't do it *intelligently*.)

Re:Sorry, but it's not for me.

[Colin Smith]

Mmm. Nah. The Semantic Web is most useful to remove humans from the loop completely. i.e. When Skynet wants to know which batter had the most RBIs in 1997 it will be able to understand from the XML DTD what a batter is and how that relates to RBIs...

So... What's an RBI then when it's at home?

no ads please

[randuev]

http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=19627 for those who don't want the ads
but even without ads the article is very shallow. how is it "semantic" web exactly?

not strong enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry folks, but twine just isn't gonna cut it. We need something sturdier. Someone needs to start a similar project called 'ducttape'.

Attack of the Misunderstood Acronyms!

[the linux geek]

"Written with the Semantic Web Standards, called W3C, in mind."

Yikes. That's horrible.

"Fighting the hype problem"?

[Red Flayer]

FTA (second page):

It's still too early to know if Twine will be successful with consumers, says Tony Shaw, president of Semantic Universe, an organization committed to raising awareness of semantic technologies in business and consumer settings. Success will not simply depend on making the technology work, but also on managing people's expectations of the technology, he says. "It's about fighting the hype problem."

Hmm. Let's fight the hype problem by publishing more hype. And maybe if we include a statement saying we're fighting hype, people will assume this reformatted press release isn't hype.

Sure, I understand that managing expectations is important, but let's not lose sight of what this article really is.

Flashback

[houstonbofh]

While reading TFA I had a flashback to reading a 90's era ASP press release. "Ohhh... Shiny and pointless!"

Clearly some new meaning of semantic Web here

[clickclickdrone]

Unless I've missed some whole new sub-branch, semantic web to me means marking it up properly to give meaning to the various page elements via correct tags and microformats. This is just an overgrown agregator.

I'm already using the Semantic Web

[progprog]

Let's see if it works on Slashdot.

Goofy project

[wytcld]

It's well-known in linguistics and philosophy that "You don't get semantics from syntax." It's well-known in computer science that computers are syntactical. It's well-known in recent business history that all startups claiming they'd produce "expert systems" or "artificial intelligence" in which computer systems would, despite these accepted truths, perform semantic feats have miserably failed to live up to their claims.

So why don't we give PR puff pieces like this the same warm reception we give to the latest announcement of a perpetual motion machine? It's the kind of project only plausible to those who know very little of the basic background well-accepted by experts in the pertinent adjacent fields. That one or two big names from the success of the syntactical www either aren't familiar with or don't accept core knowledge from linguistics and philosophy of language is finally no different than Thomas Edison working for years on a machine to talk to ghosts: brilliance in one area most often doesn't translate into other areas in which you have no background - and even more rarely into areas where nobody knows how it would be done.

Re:Goofy project

[jpfed]

It's well-known in linguistics and philosophy that "You don't get semantics from syntax." That's right- we get semantics from interpretation.

So why don't we give PR puff pieces like this the same warm reception we give to the latest announcement of a perpetual motion machine? Because the right syntax can give to a computer very helpful clues towards productive interpretations. Data- which is just "syntax"- helps to drive computers to more effectively interpret other, related data all the freaking time. That's not what kills the semantic web idea.

What kills the semantic web idea is that all the millions of individual producers of data don't have any immediate incentive to mark their own data up for the benefit of others.

Re:Too many buzzwords. too little content

[oliderid]

The video is useless; the guy is doing a demo, but the video only shows the face of the speaker, not the demo.

let's do some semantic here: useless, demo, speaker. Anwser:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_bubble

Cool, the good old days are back, time to make some easy money :-).