When language first developed in our species there were no endless debates about ontologies...
Well, we don't really know that. Maybe there was; the world may never find out. But we do know the evolution of languages has left us with several hundred languages. Some are more similar than others. Allowing this evolutionary process on the web would create hundreds of little islands of ontological similarity.
We translate between those human languages all the time though, don't we? We can't automate that very well because human language is complex; the semantic web languages aim to be machine-readable though.
My main point was one of adoption. People and corporations need incentive to make changes. People hate change and
corporations see change as risky. People won't invest in learning and changing without believing that it will help them significantly.
Without the added value of making the web more automated for "intelligent agents", businesses do not have an incentive to take
on the risk of change. Even if they did, they would be opening up their websites to more automation. Many corporation do not see
that as a good thing. Look at legal challenges to deep linking or their reaction to competitive bidding sites.
Seems like a lot of FUD - all we might be talking about to start with is a bit of extra metadata (in your META tags) that describes a few of your company's main pages, using Dublin Core vocabulary; the 'risk' is negligible.
I agree though, that well-designed automated tools are a challenge, and will be needed to gain widespread use.
If this technology gains some acceptance, people will adopt it for fear of being left out in the cold by the search engines (I hear managers saying to their techies "We need to be semantically enabled - I don't know what that means but I want it!")
"you'd have to get users, most of whom are wholly uninterested in finding web resources, to use the Semantic web system."
Aren't most web users interested in finding web resources? That's why they spend hours using search engines...
"At this point in time it would be practically impossible to backtrack to a systematically laid out web."
I don't think anybody in semantic web research is suggesting this...
"Probably the best you could do is simulate one using a search engine that constantly sought and categorized pages intelligently."
This is more what people are suggesting; by defining and publishing terms (and making them machine parseable), equivalences between ontologies can be identified and applied automatically, along with other machine reasoning.
"Even then, you'd have to convince people to use your search engine, which, unless you really provide a superior one like Google or a deep catalog like Yahoo!, would be pretty hard to do."
Not a problem if Google and Yahoo start to make use of the semantic web technology for their searching and indexing...
>...you wonder why it hasn't been done.
>You give the plane a topographical map of the >region, a gps system, and the gps coordinates of >the target.
GPS is an extremely weak signal, and very easy to jam; that's why it hasn't been done.
Slashdot Mirror
When language first developed in our species there were no endless debates about ontologies ...
Well, we don't really know that. Maybe there was; the world may never find out. But we do know the evolution of languages has left us with several hundred languages. Some are more similar than others. Allowing this evolutionary process on the web would create hundreds of little islands of ontological similarity.
We translate between those human languages all the time though, don't we? We can't automate that very well because human language is complex; the semantic web languages aim to be machine-readable though.
My main point was one of adoption. People and corporations need incentive to make changes. People hate change and corporations see change as risky. People won't invest in learning and changing without believing that it will help them significantly. Without the added value of making the web more automated for "intelligent agents", businesses do not have an incentive to take on the risk of change. Even if they did, they would be opening up their websites to more automation. Many corporation do not see that as a good thing. Look at legal challenges to deep linking or their reaction to competitive bidding sites.
Seems like a lot of FUD - all we might be talking about to start with is a bit of extra metadata (in your META tags) that describes a few of your company's main pages, using Dublin Core vocabulary; the 'risk' is negligible.
I agree though, that well-designed automated tools are a challenge, and will be needed to gain widespread use.
If this technology gains some acceptance, people will adopt it for fear of being left out in the cold by the search engines (I hear managers saying to their techies "We need to be semantically enabled - I don't know what that means but I want it!")
David Allsopp.
Aren't most web users interested in finding web resources? That's why they spend hours using search engines...
"At this point in time it would be practically impossible to backtrack to a systematically laid out web."
I don't think anybody in semantic web research is suggesting this...
"Probably the best you could do is simulate one using a search engine that constantly sought and categorized pages intelligently."
This is more what people are suggesting; by defining and publishing terms (and making them machine parseable), equivalences between ontologies can be identified and applied automatically, along with other machine reasoning.
"Even then, you'd have to convince people to use your search engine, which, unless you really provide a superior one like Google or a deep catalog like Yahoo!, would be pretty hard to do."
Not a problem if Google and Yahoo start to make use of the semantic web technology for their searching and indexing...
David Allsopp.
>...you wonder why it hasn't been done. >You give the plane a topographical map of the >region, a gps system, and the gps coordinates of >the target. GPS is an extremely weak signal, and very easy to jam; that's why it hasn't been done.