Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

« Congress flattens bikes || Back to Blog | Donut man »

July 22, 2003

Help me understand the Semantic Web?

For the past few weeks I've been noodling with an article on the Semantic Web. At the moment I'm particularly interested in the scope of its ambitions and whether they've changed over time. If you know about this and would like to talk with me, send me an email: self@evident.com.

Thanks.

Posted by D. Weinberger at July 22, 2003 08:57 AM


TrackBack

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Help me understand the Semantic Web?:

» What is the Semantic web? from Marc's terminal
David Weinberger is solicting comments on how the Semantic Web has changed since it was first invisioned. Personally I think one of the problems the Semantic Web has is that the vision has not changed all that much (well maybe... [Read More]

Tracked on July 23, 2003 02:29 AM

» More Noodling on the Semantic Web from A Networked World
Dave Weinberger has started something in here; actually, a little feedback is all it took to give me permission to dump a lot of stuff that has been sitting around for a while now. Here goes. The semantic web breaks [Read More]

Tracked on July 31, 2003 06:46 AM

» The Web Is Not Semantic, Its a Hologram from A Networked World
Download the word file here The more I think about the Semantic Web, the more it sounds like very earnest barking up the wrong tree. I have always been leery of Metadata and especially that defined by the writer of [Read More]

Tracked on July 31, 2003 06:47 AM

Comments

Hello!
Could you send me the article?

a hug from Brazil,

Su
my email is ssguti@terra.com.br

Posted by: Suzana | July 22, 2003 11:50 PM


I'd appreciate a copy as well. I'm having real trouble figuring out why anyone would spend time trying top down, command style tool for the web that requires people to know, deploy, and remember to use hosts of ontologies. Google doesn't know a thing about astrophysics or the painting of Van Gogh, but it still finds us the right answers most of the time.

To quote you, I think, "it is the Web's Theory of Authenticity with its corollary that Imperfection Is a Virtue. In macro you get the Messy Network Axiom with its corollary that Efficiency is the Enemy of Truth"

I have this nagging feeling that annotation, collaboration and reputation are much more important for where we are going than building ever more accurate definitions.

As someone said of learning objects, if you define them too loosely they can't be linked, if you define them too tightly, they can't be reused. That's how I feel about the semantic web, it should be an emergent property, not a set of definitions.

Or maybe I just don't get it. Oh, this is where I came in.

Posted by: Earl Mardle | July 24, 2003 08:18 AM


Post a comment

Guidelines for Commenting

Basically, you can say what you want. (Click here for the fine print.)

If you haven't left a comment here before, your comment may be put into a queue for me to approve. Sorry for the delay. Blame the damn spammers.