Stephen's argument is based on the belief that "The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating." He says:
"But the big problem is they believed everyone would work together:
would agree on web standards (hah!)
would adopt a common vocabulary (you don't say)
would reliably expose their APIs so anyone could use them (as if)"
While the argument he makes is grounded in his distrust of corporations, which I share to some degree, his second point above is off the mark, at least for RDF.
One of the features of the W3C's model (based on RDF) is that it doesn't push the idea that everyone should adopt the same vocabulary (or ontology) for a topic or domain. Instead it offers a way to publish vocabularies with some semantics, including how terms in one vocabulary relate to terms in another. In addition, the framework makes it trivial to publish data in which you mix vocabularies, making statements about a person, for example, using terms drawn from FOAF, Dublin Core and others.
The RDF approach was designed with interoperability and extensibility in mind, unlike many other approaches. RDF is showing increasing adoption, showing up in products by Oracle, Adobe and Microsoft, for example.
If this approach doesn't continue to flourish and help realize the envisioned "web of data", and it might not after all, it will have left some key concepts, tested and explored, on the table for the next push. IMHO, the 'semantic web' vision -- a web of data for machines and their users -- is inevitable.
Using the hot shoe is a great hack. The device looks kind of clunky and the need to take action to integrate the geo-tagging data with the photos is a pain, but more and better will follow, right?
One of the easiest ways to set up a sites with ads that your "paid to read" gang clicks on is to establish a nest of splogs and automatically populate them with plagiarized content from real blogs. We think that companies like Google and Yahoo can benefit from better automatic splog detection (e.g., http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/tag/splog/). It might be possible to test this hypothesis by analyzing the frequency of splogs as a source of clicks for an advertiser. If anyone whould like to share their data we might be able to do such an analysis.
Perhaps I should have clarified how Google didn't help. I had asked Peter Norvig if we might be able to get all of the.owl,.rdf,.rdfs, etc files. He said he'd check, but we never heard back. This was during the early stage of the runup to the IPO, so I was neither upset nor surprised. If Google started helping all of the web hackers in the world, they'd never get anything done. Besides, it gave us a new problem to solve and left us with a ice warm feeling after we did. I'm pretty sure our use of the Google API was in line with their TOS and didn't stress their systems any more than a random user with a bad caffeine habit.
I am a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at UMBC (the University of Maryland Baltimore County) and suggest that you take a look at out information technology programs. UMBC is a medium-sized, selective, public research university that is part of the University of Maryland System. We attracts high-achieving students to its undergraduate and graduate programs in the liberal arts and sciences and engineering.
UMBC's 10,000 undergraduates and 1,500 graduate students come from 42 states and 71 foreign countries. Over 3000 of our students are majoring in one of our IT programs -- Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Information Systems, and Digital Imaging. We are developing new programs (e.g., electronic commerce and also have a number of non-credit certificate programs available including a new program in information security.
We an excellent computational environment with lots of SGI, SUN and Linux workstations and servers. We are also part of the Internet2 system and have several other high speed connections to the Internet.
We enjoy a great location on a 500-acre campus in the suburbs of Baltimore just to the north of DC which present lots of opportunities for internships and coop jobs are area government labs (NASA, NSA, NIST, NRL, ARL, SSA, GAO, etc) and industrial centers (IBM, Hughes, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, CSC, etc).
Although we don't have a winning football team (ok, we don't even have a football team) we do have the number one college chess team in north and south america (winner of the Pan Am Championship in two of the past three years).
You might be interested in checking out ecTechWeb which is a directory of news, information and internet resources of interest to developers and researchers relevant to electronic commerce. It's maintained by UMBC's Institute for Global Electronic Commerce
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One of the features of the W3C's model (based on RDF) is that it doesn't push the idea that everyone should adopt the same vocabulary (or ontology) for a topic or domain. Instead it offers a way to publish vocabularies with some semantics, including how terms in one vocabulary relate to terms in another. In addition, the framework makes it trivial to publish data in which you mix vocabularies, making statements about a person, for example, using terms drawn from FOAF, Dublin Core and others.
The RDF approach was designed with interoperability and extensibility in mind, unlike many other approaches. RDF is showing increasing adoption, showing up in products by Oracle, Adobe and Microsoft, for example.
If this approach doesn't continue to flourish and help realize the envisioned "web of data", and it might not after all, it will have left some key concepts, tested and explored, on the table for the next push. IMHO, the 'semantic web' vision -- a web of data for machines and their users -- is inevitable.
Using the hot shoe is a great hack. The device looks kind of clunky and the need to take action to integrate the geo-tagging data with the photos is a pain, but more and better will follow, right?
One of the easiest ways to set up a sites with ads that your "paid to read" gang clicks on is to establish a nest of splogs and automatically populate them with plagiarized content from real blogs. We think that companies like Google and Yahoo can benefit from better automatic splog detection (e.g., http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/tag/splog/). It might be possible to test this hypothesis by analyzing the frequency of splogs as a source of clicks for an advertiser. If anyone whould like to share their data we might be able to do such an analysis.
Perhaps I should have clarified how Google didn't help. I had asked Peter Norvig if we might be able to get all of the .owl, .rdf, .rdfs, etc files. He said he'd check, but we never heard back. This was during the early stage of the runup to the IPO, so I was neither upset nor surprised. If Google started helping all of the web hackers in the world, they'd never get anything done. Besides, it gave us a new problem to solve and left us with a ice warm feeling after we did. I'm pretty sure our use of the Google API was in line with their TOS and didn't stress their systems any more than a random user with a bad caffeine habit.
UMBC's 10,000 undergraduates and 1,500 graduate students come from 42 states and 71 foreign countries. Over 3000 of our students are majoring in one of our IT programs -- Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Information Systems, and Digital Imaging. We are developing new programs (e.g., electronic commerce and also have a number of non-credit certificate programs available including a new program in information security.
We an excellent computational environment with lots of SGI, SUN and Linux workstations and servers. We are also part of the Internet2 system and have several other high speed connections to the Internet.
We enjoy a great location on a 500-acre campus in the suburbs of Baltimore just to the north of DC which present lots of opportunities for internships and coop jobs are area government labs (NASA, NSA, NIST, NRL, ARL, SSA, GAO, etc) and industrial centers (IBM, Hughes, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, CSC, etc).
Although we don't have a winning football team (ok, we don't even have a football team) we do have the number one college chess team in north and south america (winner of the Pan Am Championship in two of the past three years).
You might be interested in checking out ecTechWeb which is a directory of news, information and internet resources of interest to developers and researchers relevant to electronic commerce. It's maintained by UMBC's Institute for Global Electronic Commerce