Monday, June 06, 2005
ACM News Service:
"'Web Future Is Not Semantic, or Overly Orderly'
CIO Insight (05/05) Vol. 1, No. 53, P. 25; Nee, Eric
Eric Nee disputes World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) director Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a Semantic Web in which computers can comprehend the meaning of information through the encoding of metadata within every piece of online content. He also dismisses the concept of an intelligent Semantic Web agent that can carry out complex tasks with the capability of a human being as impossible. Berners-Lee's strategy for imbuing meaning in Web content is to develop new standards for posting such content, but the W3C's Resource Description Framework (RDF), RDF Schema, and Web Ontology Language (OWL) standards have not been universally welcomed. OWL and RDF have a steep learning curve, take a long time to use, and are unworkable, according to experts such as XML developer and Sun Microsystems technology director Tim Bray. In contrast to Berners-Lee's approach, Google creators Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed software that infers the meaning of content using different indicators, thus avoiding the need to change processes for posting content. 'I'd rather make progress by having computers understand what humans write, than by forcing humans to write in ways that computers can understand,' Brin told InfoWorld's 2002 CTO Forum. Challenges the Google approach fails to address can be tackled by other technologies--RSS and XML, for instance--that are simpler to use than Semantic Web standards. Nee predicts that the Internet will evolve not into Berners-Lee's highly ordered Semantic Web, but into 'a patchwork quilt of homegrown solutions and standards.'
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"'Web Future Is Not Semantic, or Overly Orderly'
CIO Insight (05/05) Vol. 1, No. 53, P. 25; Nee, Eric
Eric Nee disputes World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) director Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a Semantic Web in which computers can comprehend the meaning of information through the encoding of metadata within every piece of online content. He also dismisses the concept of an intelligent Semantic Web agent that can carry out complex tasks with the capability of a human being as impossible. Berners-Lee's strategy for imbuing meaning in Web content is to develop new standards for posting such content, but the W3C's Resource Description Framework (RDF), RDF Schema, and Web Ontology Language (OWL) standards have not been universally welcomed. OWL and RDF have a steep learning curve, take a long time to use, and are unworkable, according to experts such as XML developer and Sun Microsystems technology director Tim Bray. In contrast to Berners-Lee's approach, Google creators Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed software that infers the meaning of content using different indicators, thus avoiding the need to change processes for posting content. 'I'd rather make progress by having computers understand what humans write, than by forcing humans to write in ways that computers can understand,' Brin told InfoWorld's 2002 CTO Forum. Challenges the Google approach fails to address can be tackled by other technologies--RSS and XML, for instance--that are simpler to use than Semantic Web standards. Nee predicts that the Internet will evolve not into Berners-Lee's highly ordered Semantic Web, but into 'a patchwork quilt of homegrown solutions and standards.'
Click Here to View Full Article"
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