hi. ho.
happy easter, if you're into that sort of thing.
"The May issue of Scientific American features an article outlining the Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee's latest drum to beat (see the W3C papers on it here.) The article explains:hmmm. i can't tell from his rant if he's against the 'semantics' part or the 'assisting the evolution of human knowledge part'.The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users.
This is one of those Extremely Noble and massively complex endeavors wherein academics, removed from the real world, attempt to solve a problem nobody has. (I fear MIT's Oxygen project will suffer a similar fate.) The only reason the Semantic Web gets any press is that Tim Berners-Lee, the "Father of the Web," is working on it.
History has shown us that technology inventors often haven't the faintest clue about the device's actual use. Did folks line up to hear what Philo T Farnsworth had to say about television?
Hypertext creators tend to have Extremely Noble intents for their technology. Douglas Engelbart was obsessed with "augmenting" intellect, and the first development of the WWW was definitely along those lines (for academics to compare notes). And the Semantic Web is no different. From the SciAm article:
If properly designed, the Semantic Web can assist the evolution of human knowledge as a whole.
Problem being, no one, apart from some self-appointed Bringers Of Fire, wants their intellect augmented, nor really cares about the "evolution of human knowledge." The Web, this extremely exciting hypertext platform, serves other human needs and desires--primarily to communicate, also for sexual release (porn!), and for finding information of personal relevance (what's the weather where I'm traveling? how can I do my job better? where's my favorite band playing?)."
i have no gripe with the basic proposition that we need to formalize the semantics of both resources and services. this is a necessary requirement to support conversational technologies [ regardless if those conversations are taking place between humans or software ] and the whole web-based services scheme. the semantics are somewhere - either embedded in db schema, or an interface spec or in the natural language between the font tags in a web page. the only question is how one exposes the semantics to facilitate the location, discovery, description, and integration of resources and services. this, in turn, depends on the complexity of the system that you are trying to formalize. for "simple" software services, UDDI may suffice. for more complicated resources, you need more complicated ontological mechanisms. rdf might be right for some types of resources. maybe not.
"the semantic" web exists on a continuum of formalized semantics, with different methods being appropriate for various points along the continuum. at one end you have the status quo, with semantics embedded in "meta" tags, db schema and interface definition languages. at the other end you have rdf and stronger versions of knowledge representation. in between all this you get things like uddi.
the development of these multiple parallel versions of the semantic web are going to enable the very things that he thinks the market wants - like communication, sexual release and finding information of personal relevance.
"Conversations provide a comfortable medium in which knowledge flows in both directions, and where contributors share an inherent context through their subjects and relationships. In addition to old forms of conversations--direct interaction and communication over the phone and in person--conversations are becoming an increasingly important part of the networked world. Witness the popularity of email, chat, and instant messaging, which enable users to increase the range and scope of their conversations to reach those that they may not have before.
Still, little attention has been paid in recent years to the popular Internet channels that most naturally support conversations."
""ActiveState's release of the first application built on Mozilla is a watershed event for the open source movement," said Tim O'Reilly, Founder & CEO of O'Reilly & Associates. "It demonstrates that there's more to Mozilla than the next generation Netscape browser. More importantly, it provides the web-enabled IDE that makes cross-platform development with open source languages like Perl and Python accessible to more than the hacker elite.""more proof that mozilla is not just a browser. wish i had some time to play around with it.
The Semantic Web:
" Semantic Web researchers, in contrast, accept that paradoxes and unanswerable questions are a price that must be paid to achieve versatility. We make the language for the rules as expressive as needed to allow the Web to reason as widely as desired. This philosophy is similar to that of the conventional Web: early in the Web's development, detractors pointed out that it could never be a well-organized library; without a central database and tree structure, one would never be sure of finding everything. They were right. But the expressive power of the system made vast amounts of information available, and search engines (which would have seemed quite impractical a decade ago) now produce remarkably complete indices of a lot of the material out there. The challenge of the Semantic Web, therefore, is to provide a language that expresses both data and rules for reasoning about the data and that allows rules from any existing knowledge-representation system to be exported onto the Web."The Semantic Web In Depth:
"Recently, the phrase Semantic Web has been popping up more and more. Unfortunately, there are no really good non-technical explanations of what it is. This is a first draft attempt at breaking the Semantic Web down into it's component parts and describing each in summary. Be forewarned that the explanation is detailed and covers many of the facets of the Semantic Web."
just in time for summer - look snazzy and support the site at the same time by buying some snowdeal schwag!
“The stranger has been a fundamental touchstone of cultures at least since Abraham and Sarah invited weary road travelers into their tent only to find out that they were angels in disguise. The Odyssey, too, is a meditation on strangers and hospitality: Odysseus experiences different ways of being a stranger on his way home while the suitors abuse every rule of hospitality in his own house. It's easy to see why strangers are so important: a culture's attitude towards them expresses its understanding of its position in the world of social groups. In our culture, we're suspicious of strangers. They're a threat. They lurk in shadows. On the Web, however, strangers are the source of everything worthwhile. Strangers and their utterances are the stuff of the Web.”
the hyperlinked metaphysics of the web
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