The rest of this thread is a little bit misguided; the entire discussion is centered around users and writing the tags. Those things are not a problem. It will be as problematic writing embedded code in HTML as it is now writing CSS, DHTML, PHP, JavaScript, etc. We've never been too lazy to incorporate more code before, and we're not all too lazy to incorporate some more tags now, that's ridiculous.
Organizing the incorporation of multiple and related ontologies on the Semantic Web is much tougher, and there's a lot of research being done in the area. It's probably quite doable with some global guidelines.
The problems you discuss here are significantly detramental to the goals of the Semantic Web. I wonder what "basic inference techniques" you speak of. Somehow I still argue in favor of more metadata.
Even if we are inherently lazy, and even though some people seem to be generally against the idea, it doesn't make any sense to me not to employ this and experiment with it. Norvig is an AI guru, and his ideas on the Semantic Web may be interesting, but Google is not against the idea. Google's GData looks to me like a primitive Semantic Web. Even if only 10% of web masters adopt the system, querying to find a set of results that have been tagged as certain meta-data can come up with some interesting results. If the results are interesting enough, more webpages will include meta data tags. Also, being inherently lazy argues for not spending time writing tags all over your code, so why would anyone take the time to sabotage the system. While I understand the difficulties of the spamming problem, there are plenty of cookies on the internet anyway. I think the same inherent problem in the Semantic Web exists with PageRank. In PageRank what happens is a web page will say the same words over and over to acheive a higher ranking in the semantic analysis of the page, and thus the page will be a top result when entering a query with related words. But I think PageRank works pretty well overall. Google's next step with PageRank is to filter all the spam sites that just say the same words. Security in the Semantic Web would also be to filter those sites with obviously spammy RDF or OWL tagging. Overall the Semantic Web is a cool project that could lead to really smart searches, with axioms involving how different meta-tags are related to each other. I'm in favor of the new technology.
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Agreed.
The rest of this thread is a little bit misguided; the entire discussion is centered around users and writing the tags. Those things are not a problem. It will be as problematic writing embedded code in HTML as it is now writing CSS, DHTML, PHP, JavaScript, etc. We've never been too lazy to incorporate more code before, and we're not all too lazy to incorporate some more tags now, that's ridiculous.
Organizing the incorporation of multiple and related ontologies on the Semantic Web is much tougher, and there's a lot of research being done in the area. It's probably quite doable with some global guidelines.
The problems you discuss here are significantly detramental to the goals of the Semantic Web. I wonder what "basic inference techniques" you speak of. Somehow I still argue in favor of more metadata.
Even if we are inherently lazy, and even though some people seem to be generally against the idea, it doesn't make any sense to me not to employ this and experiment with it. Norvig is an AI guru, and his ideas on the Semantic Web may be interesting, but Google is not against the idea. Google's GData looks to me like a primitive Semantic Web. Even if only 10% of web masters adopt the system, querying to find a set of results that have been tagged as certain meta-data can come up with some interesting results. If the results are interesting enough, more webpages will include meta data tags. Also, being inherently lazy argues for not spending time writing tags all over your code, so why would anyone take the time to sabotage the system. While I understand the difficulties of the spamming problem, there are plenty of cookies on the internet anyway. I think the same inherent problem in the Semantic Web exists with PageRank. In PageRank what happens is a web page will say the same words over and over to acheive a higher ranking in the semantic analysis of the page, and thus the page will be a top result when entering a query with related words. But I think PageRank works pretty well overall. Google's next step with PageRank is to filter all the spam sites that just say the same words. Security in the Semantic Web would also be to filter those sites with obviously spammy RDF or OWL tagging. Overall the Semantic Web is a cool project that could lead to really smart searches, with axioms involving how different meta-tags are related to each other. I'm in favor of the new technology.