Wednesday, May 29, 2002

In a debate about the future of the semantic web I had in one of my classes last fall someone raised the objection that the idea could never fly because the resources used to reformat or refactor all the content of the intenet into XML would be too costly.  And if the cost benefit analysis didn't work out then the idea must be rejected.  I countered that the semantic web didn't need to recode all of the existing documents; it would succeed by building onto what has already been accomplished with the internet. Now a new article comes along and argues that documents that initially appear to be unstructured, and thus unreadable to a computer, are actually structured by their visual formatting.  via XMLhack 11:43:45 PM     I'm always interested in the theory of connections on the internet and how people formulate the idea.  From some I've seen recent discussions of the size of a community versus the size of an audience.  (Clay Shirky, "Communities, Audience, and Scale" )  Now here is quick point that strikes me today even though I've heard it before: the many-to-many versus few-to-many connections. I'm going to add the network relationship, number of connections to my future of creativity project. 11:37:36 PM

© Copyright 2002 Todd Suomela. Last update: 6/5/2002; 1:55:58 AM.