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Friday, November 07, 2003 |
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Clay Shirky on the Semantic Web. I always thought, not having looked at it too closely, that the essence of the Semantic Web was an extensive new mechanism for adding meta data, "meaning" to content, thereby allowing better searching and processing. I'm a skeptic about meta tagging, and certainly not the only one. There are those that swear by it, that say information has no meaning unless it is put into context, which is hard to disagree with it. My skepticism is pointed more towards collaboration, knowledge management, and similar systems which avoid free floating text and insist that everything be categorized, tagged, and fully specified. While this sounds like a good idea, in practice it doesn't work. But... I learn from Clay's piece that meta tagging is the less ambitious part of the semantic web. The more ambitious part is an elaborate model for reasoning (in the AI sense of the word) about informaiton on the web, or as Clay says, "Artificial Intelligence Reborn"... Anyway, you've got to read the article to get the whole delicious flavor of it. I leave you with a few quotes which deserve to be added to the list of ageless put downs:
...and...
'nuf said. Well done! 10:27:52 PM > trackback [] comment [] 
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Shel Isreal on Why do people hate Bill Gates Shell Israel is off to a good start in his brand new blog. I couldn't agree more. Gates and the Gates Foundation don't get the respect they reserve. At least in the tech community. I'm sure in the World Health community or the Philantropy community he gets plenty of credit. In his last paragraph, Shel says: "A century from now, the Gates Foundation will be known for the human suffering it battled and hopefully defeated." To which, I add: "A century from now, who will have heard of Microsoft or Longhorn....?" 10:15:09 PM > trackback [] comment []
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