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Steve Cayzer from HP is talking about semantic blogging. He's working on an HP Labs project on the semantic web. "Blogging is cool but it could be even cooler...using semantic web techniques." (I enjoyed talking with Steve at last night's dinner.)

Semantic blogging would enable us to view blogs other than reverse chronological order, to do semantic navigation (made possible by attaching meanings to links), and do semantic queries, asking who's blogging on a particular item. To do this, we need a way to share meaning context. That means not just metadata but metadata described by an ontology, a formal way of structuring knowledge, e.g., a hierarchical classification scheme. The semantic web enables people to "create and share these ontologies in a decentralized way." Steve's t-shirt for the semantic web is: "Markup with meaning."

One benefit: When doing a search, you will find stuff even if it doesn't use any of the words you're looking for.

We already have emergent ontology sharing. E.g., the TopicExchange that uses TrackBack for a community to arrive at a shared, decentralized ontology.

Steve touts Semantic Web Advanced Development as a resource.

Question: The AI communities have been trying to create representations of human knowledge, but it seems that there's consensus that it's an impossible task.

Steve: Yes. The CYC project is often criticized for trying to do this. But the Semantic Web isn't trying to capture all knowledge in a single ontology. It allows small groups to create their own ontologies, and then enables them to be linked.