Microsoft, Semantic Web, etc.
I mentioned a few days ago that over the weekend I had the opportunity to talk with Robert Wahbe (leads the XML Web Services team at Microsoft). He commented on his dissapointment with the W3C because it is spending resources on things like the Semantic Web instead of core internet protocols, etc. I agree that the Internet should be a standards based "dumb network" - the intelligence should be in what we hang on the edges - new applications like P2P, new groupware products, etc. I mentioned that the most important thing that Microsoft could do (in my opinion - and I was talking about server side Windows, not the client side) was to work on extreme platform stability while allowing frequent security updates). He suggested that perhaps using virutal machine technology would be a good way to allow system administrators to roll out updated systems and test them in parallel with current systems - interesting idea, to be sure.
While I was in LA, I received an Amazon delivery at home, "Spinning the Semantic Web". I have just started looking at this book (just published, but contains older papers) so it will be a while (if ever) before I comment on it in depth here. However, I do like the idea of a Semantic Web "overlay" to sematically index the web. RDF/RDF Schema, and Topic Maps are two similar and competing technologies.
One problem with the Semantic Web is that it needs to be adopted before it is useful but may not be adopted because it is not yet useful (you get the idea).
My company sells software tools for automatically extracting some semantic information from the web - writing a tool that generates, for example, some RDF tags automatically is a definite possibility. I question if this would make a good commercial product (market?), so that is on a 'back burner' for a while.
8:23:09 AM 
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