::scr semantic

[Alaric B. Snell]

On Monday 05 August 2002 10:19, you wrote:
> > So, this Semantic Web thing. Some people
> > to be very excited about it. As far I can see it's just a mechanism so
> > that I dont have to do all that tedious screen scraping myself but then,
>
> to keep this provocatively brief: it's what ted nelson has always been
> looking for, and also what tim berners-lee has always been looking for.
> it's our chance to re-cast the old web as 'build one to throw away, you
> will anyway'. it's our chance to learn from our mistakes and build
> something that's resistant to evangelistic semantic attack. it's many
> services over many interfaces, thus the semantic 'web' thing is a bit of a
> misnomer. it's the semantic net. or, it's just RDF, and bots, and the
> localised wireless net.

The semantic web may even be theoretically possible to extract some 
usefulness out of, too, but don't hold your breath.

Small semantic weblets (intrasemanticwebs? :-) might work out, since they 
then work like distributed Prolog systems, but nobody's yet found a way to 
make it scale to a global system. Problems include the fact that one group of 
people might start publishing tuples of the form "fancies(<url of 
Alaric>,<url of Anna Paquin>)" while another might be publishing 
"wants-to-snog(<....>,<...>)", which are interchangeable. A bit of software 
looking for potential celebrity stalkers would need to be able to deal with 
these variations; perhaps some kind of relationship synonym directory 
maintained by volunteers, or a central registry that encourages people to 
find an existing relationship rather than searching for a new one...

But anyway. What will actually pull together all of these assertions to come 
to conclusions (and how will it deal with contradictory or untrustworthy 
information)? I see something like Google being the only thing that can 
actually make semantic inferences with much utility; for everyone else it'll 
be limited to their corporate intranets or they will explicitly subscribe to 
information services - "sign up to get hold of a huge knowledge base about 
cats", rather than the more peer to peer model of publishing we currently 
have.

So I'm skeptical!

ABS