I came across this essay summarizing certain ideas on where the web may go and why and I was struck how, on first review, it did not make any sense - not in the vision but the elements. There is a problem with people playing with the idea of the web which seems to be based on knowing more about the web than knowing about ideas. The utility the web can bring is through its organization not necessarily further complications of linking or these semantics, some sort of basic artificial intellegence. Before any of that makes any sense, it must be fixed to a comprehensive reference related to the way ideas work rather than the media, the web. Off the cuff, there are three ways ideas work: like a myth, like a hierarchical codification or like a dictionary - Plato, Aristotle or Samuel Johnson. [Are there more?] The stuff of dynamic ideas are not good in myth as myth is given - the tough bit is figuring meaning. That may be where the web is now as it is run by those in love with it, who love leaning over deep pools.
How it speaks to itself, as we do in our minds free of myth, will require not mimicking how we think but something more between the what and why - ideas. Someone needs to distill the ideas out of all this content and make them maliable, transformable, comprehensible. Winer's categories are a very bad codification as it based on personal taxonomy which will likely only compound confusion - a bad filing system loses documents without them leaving the room. Google is a very bad dictionary which cannot guide you to what idea is the best or more useful for your purpose, a shoe box of receipts awaiting an accountant's hand.
We don't need the web to think for us. It is not there yet. We need the web to be able to even tell us what it contains first, what it has gathered - not just that it has gathered.
Comments
Alan - November 24, 2003 9:17 pm
Here is a neat definition of semantic web from Tim B-L in the Scientific American May 2001 article "The Semantic Web" in the midst of a illustration about health records:<blockquote class="smalltext">...Pete and Lucy could use their agents to carry out all these tasks thanks not to the World Wide Web of today but rather the Semantic Web that it will evolve into tomorrow. Most of the Web's content today is designed for humans to read, not for computer programs to manipulate meaningfully. Computers can adeptly parse Web pages for layout and routine processing—here a header, there a link to another page—but in general, computers have no reliable way to process the semantics: this is the home page of the Hartman and Strauss Physio Clinic, this link goes to Dr. Hartman's curriculum vitae. 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. Such an agent coming to the clinic's Web page will know not just that the page has keywords such as "treatment, medicine, physical, therapy" (as might be encoded today) but also that Dr. Hartman works at this clinic on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and that the script takes a date range in yyyy-mm-dd format and returns appointment times. And it will "know" all this without needing artificial intelligence on the scale of 2001's Hal or Star Wars's C-3PO. Instead these semantics were encoded into the Web page when the clinic's office manager (who never took Comp Sci 101) massaged it into shape using off-the-shelf software for writing Semantic Web pages along with resources listed on the Physical Therapy Association's site.</blockquote>Aside from the personal information protection issues that this particular illustration rolls over without a care, do you really want information tools readily available which can, as illustrated, glean what you do not know about yourself, what you cannot know as the web does not provide information now categorized by keyword, only coarsely searchable? In whose hands will these tools reside?
Alan - November 24, 2003 9:38 pm
Another quote from the end of the essay:<blockquote class="smalltext">The Semantic Web, in naming every concept simply by a URI, lets anyone express new concepts that they invent with minimal effort. Its unifying logical language will enable these concepts to be progressively linked into a universal Web. This structure will open up the knowledge and workings of humankind to meaningful analysis by software agents, providing a new class of tools by which we can live, work and learn together.</blockquote>It still requires minimal effort which appears to be contituted by the formualtion fo thequestion to be fed into the web. We still have to know the question. I do not know the questions I will have answered when I browse through a library, the connections <i>I</i> will make. Intellegence is the linking of ideas, the exploration of ideas through associations. Doesn't the semantic web have the risk of isolating us further from that process by doing it for us according to rules of convenience defined by the technology rather than the needs of or thought patterns of the human mind?