Comments for Comment of the Day: First Base With Semantic Web

Comment of the Day: First Base With Semantic Web

2008-02-28T07:59:52Z

In our post Tim Berners-Lee Says the Time for the Semantic Web is Now, the Web's inventor is quoted as saying that "people are realizing it’s time to just go do it." But commenter Gregory isn't getting as excited - he thinks that "we haven't even gotten to first base". And no we're not talking about something Valleywag would cover. It's the Semantic Web, kids. Congratulations Gregory, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher - courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget. Here's his full comment:

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"i strongly agree with your "reach new heights" thinking...

no matter how fine the mesh, human consciousness will be more subtle, and having a lot of the grunt work conceptualization taken care of machine-wise will reallyt allow this to become obvious...

the genome guys thought for a few minutes they got to the fundamental building blocks, and found that, no way, there was so much more at subtler levels that it only increased the questions...

same with the semantic web thing...

the danger? algorithms taken as reality, in the same way your insurance sx canceled by a computer because of some obscure programmer's decision

anyway, it is going to arrive sooner rather than later, after all, technology is just the out-picturing on the material plane of the natural and inherent abilities of consciousness, and we haven't even gotten to first base"

Comment from Danny on 2008-02-28

2008-02-28T10:45:37Z

Hmm, while I don't exactly disagree with the comment - things are really crude when it comes to mapping conciousness into computers - this is slightly at a tangent to the way Semantic Web developments are currently going.

We do have a lot of totally unsubtle but *useful* systems already, working with real-world (and conceptual) data, on the desktop/mobile and in local networks. The immediate challenge isn't necessarily improving the kind of modeling we use, but integrating it on the Web. As Tim Berners-Lee points out, there's a lot of near term gain to be had.

Comment from David Scott Lewis (Zytech Solar, a Going Green 100 Winner) on 2008-02-28

2008-02-29T03:25:01Z

What is needed is a blog focused on semweb apps. I cover this for SemanticReport.com, but don't have a lot of cycles to give this the attention it deserves. (Unlike my rants over at AlwaysOn, the stuff I write for SemanticReport.com requires a helluva lot of cycles. Honestly, reading technical papers and reports is a pain in the butt, but it's the only way to see which apps are being developed at various research centers and within verticals, especially when looking at things within a KM framwork.) At this point, Paul Miller (from Talis) does the best job covering semweb realities, but his Nodalities blog is a bit too focused on the semweb community rather than on semweb (and related) apps.

A key point from my last sentence: "related." It's NOT just about semweb, it's about semweb meets intelligent agents meets UXD (user experience design) meets collaboration technologies meets knowledge management. Radar Networks gets this as do some other key semweb players. In other words, semweb is the core technology, but NOT the only key technology.