Our 6th daily Comments Competition winner comes from a comment on our post 11 Things To Know About Semantic Web. It came from Alan Wilensky, who wrote that "all of the [Semantic Web] tech that has been so promised is great for diddling, but we haven'st seen productivity delivered." Congratulations Alan, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher, courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget.
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Here is Alan's full comment which, despite starting off a little pompously, makes some interesting points:
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"Kingsley, help, they are making our poor semanticshamntic web complicated again.
There should be a license required to write about the two big topics in semantic technologies:
1) The technology behind it - generally recognized as the greatest blunder the W3C has ever made; OWL and RDFS.
2) The effects and resulting applications that will emerge from these technologies, and the competing technologies that leap over the OWL/RDFS abortion. (Computational Linguistics, Machine learning).
If the author is a computer scientist actually working in the field, please accept my apologies, I'm nit here to tear down, but really, all of the tech that has been so promised is great for diddling, but we haven'st seen productivity delivered.
And, I have been installing semantic browsers, add-ons, etc., since 2004.
Personally, I believe that the delivery of functions of the semantic whatever, will have to be delivered as fully integrated tools and services.
The man on the street, including some savvy small business folks, are just getting up on web apps as a service, giving up the local server in favor of services, and just getting wrapped around blogs and such as a marketing channel.
Enough on Semantic Punditry - unless you would like to order my report on the semantic web for an introductory price of $895.00, you will need the semantic browser extension to read it, and will then be able to surf contextual links that are related to your email thread and porn chats."