Seb's Open Research

Friday, November 14, 2003

Clay takes on the Semantic Web I've just spent quite a while reading replies to Clay's recent blitzkrieg on the grand Semantic Web vision. Liz has been collecting them; see also Technorati's backlinks. (By the way, if you haven't picked up the Technorati Anywhere! bookmarklet yet, you should consider it.) Here's my take on this. Part of the material that has been written on the Semantic Web was authored by AI believers looking to sell it to unsuspecting laypeople. They made ludicrous claims that basically imply that a few years from now, the complex, subtle, nuanced, and very human processes that go on in our heads will have been turned into neat first-order logic statements in a lossless way. I think Clay is right to deflate those kinds of grand visions. But the Semantic Web moniker actually encompasses a constellation of visions and initiatives, many of which are much less ambitious and more workable than those reflected by the excerpts Clay chooses to defeat. Many of them won't yield to the particular lines of argument that he brings out in his piece. In short, I don't think there's enough paint to cover Clay's target in its entirety. And my award for Most Thoughtful Reply goes to Paul Ford (who's been engaged in a semantic webpublishing labour of love for years now). What do you think? []  links to this post    5:41:42 PM   Markup, machines, and humans I found a statement I'd been meaning to make for months in a recent piece by Kendall Clark: no matter how sincere the intent that some markup language is meant to be consumed and produced only by machines, it is always the case that some human eventually ends up having to deal with that markup. Clark discusses cultural mismatches between hackerdom and academia towards the end. I agree with his observation that each culture would be better off if it borrowed some of the ways of the other. Getting members of both cultures together in one conference is a step forward; if academics could publish more on the Web, especially stuff that is not fully baked, it would help a lot as well. What do you think? []  links to this post    3:23:58 PM

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