samedi 30 août 2003

I Don't Want To Write On Your Stinking Site Today I was browsing around one of the sites in the world of Zope. On one page someone asked a question which, as is rarely the case, I actually had an intelligent answer. However, providing the answer required me to register and login. Meaning yet another stinking password to remember, and another URL to periodically revist for follow ups. Needless to say, I didn't. And that's one of the big problems of today's mostly-non-writeable web. You usually have to put your words in a place where people will find them, which usually means you put your words all over the place. There is too tight a coupling between content and location. Imagine a world where you can write on your site about things that are on other sites. As is usually the case these days, the RSS world is out in front on this, with facilities like Trackback that link together pieces of content. But it is cumbersome and has only gained traction in connecting RSS post and RSS post. Well gee, they have a word for connecting content, and that's Semantic Web. Errm, ok, that's two words. But by uttering these two words, this article has instantly been deemed ludicrous by most implementors of application servers and content management systems. Why is that? Much of the Semantic Web's wounds are, IMO, self-inflicted. RDF's worst liability seems to be its supporters. Whenever someone writes a story about RDF, one of the first posts is always a naysayer, calling the SemWeb hogwash. Alas, in rush the RDF protagonists, full of forty syllable words in explaining the virtues. These explanations generally hinge around either (a) benefits so large in scope as to appear laughable, or (b) completely focused on the how (triples, rules, AI, ontologies, etc.) instead of the why. Well naysayers, watch out, because the times they are a-changing. People are going to start solving real problems with the SemWeb, because people have finally figured out the real story. Just like the Internet isn't one big network (it's a collection of autonomous networks, an inter-net), the SemWeb isn't about one pile of 27.2 trillion facts. Instead, it's about deriving value from small groups of human endeavor. In the next year, people will start bootstrapping semantic communities. I'll be able to write on my server about one of your pages, connection preserved, and I won't a login on your stinkin' site. 11:49:07 AM   comment []