Tim Berners-Lee is the originator of the World Wide Web and was listed byTime magazine as one of the 100 greatest minds of this century. His inspiring work on the Web set the stage for a world of changes in the way people do business, entertain themselves, exchange ideas, and socialize. In this podcast, Berners-Lee talks about his early history with the Web, opportunities and challenges at present, emerging technologies, and his current project: the semantic Web.
I thought Al Gore was the inventer of the internet? Funny how wrong one can be inanit?
penguin7009
the semantic web won’t work. here’s why:
* people mean different things when they use, possibly the same, words – there is no way of agreeing on this. the use of “schemas” or ontologies are mere attempts at agreeing on what you mean by terms, but the problem is that even the definitions of these ontologies is subject to the same open problem.
* to make the above scheme successful you have to “restrict” your problem space, or the representation space. this is what is done with common computer languages .. everyone agrees what ”
” means in HTML or what “break” means in C – well enough agree to a sufficient degree so as to make the excerise useful. this is not what the web is about. the web is successful precisely becuase we gae up on a schema-enforced information-directory approach and let people uncategorised content. enforcing any useful amount of restriction would defeat the web – you will end up with a library database – not the ideals of the internet.
* you can see the depth of the problem when you see the effort put in my search engines.
* crawling robots or agents which play with some natural language processing does not count as the semantic web!
the semanic web is nothing but a buzzword – and it has traction because at one point hardly any research grants were issued unless the proposals mentioned the semantic web! (that honour used to belong to “distributed”!)
* the problem is essentially the same as that being chipped away at by the AI people – and that, we know, is vastly more complex than technology promoters can appreciate.
example: apple. do we mean apple as in Apple Computer or apple as in apple fruit? what if i change my web sie to use the more specific Pink Lady apples – how is an agent going to know what this means? if i publish a schema that says that a Pink Lady is a specialisation of the more general apple – how is that agent going to even parse my schema. and then how is it going to decode and attach *meaning* to my operators within my schema? and so it goes on … and all this so that the job of searching for the best prices for a weekly grocery shopping can be automated? how is it done today – by restricted and pre-agreed schemas and languages – far from the ideals of a semantic web as you can get.
I’m not an expert on the subject but it is probably possible to mine the website and cross linked sites and find out that certain subject clusters (field of computing) are very common and thus Apple computer is more likely the meaning.
Of course this requires knowing that apple can be a word with more than one meaning which opens a new can of worms because language is also very dynamic, meaning can change be different depending on context or new words get created.
All in all understanding semantics seems extremely complex to me (not to mention that it involves culture and can be completely different in other languages).
I guess all I have is my trust in scientific advance which always seems to happen no matter how unlikely the circumstances.
penguin7009 – If you did ANY research you would know that …
1) Al Gore was on the commitee that approved the initial funding for DARPA to build what would eventually become the internet.
2) It was REPUBLICANS that made the joke about Al Gore having supposedly invented the internet. Al Gore NEVER claimed that.
2) It was REPUBLICANS that made the joke about Al Gore having supposedly invented the internet. Al Gore NEVER claimed that.
Um, no. Gore created this controversy on his own when he made the following comments to Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s “Late Edition” program.
“During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”
Gore was playing fast and loose with words in order to score political points, and it cost him. Republicans merely capitalized on his well-documented idiocy.