Tuesday, November 11, 2003

The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview. A colleague sent me Shirky's rant on the W3C Semantic Web Activity, and I gotta say I agree with his conclusion wholeheartedly: Much of the proposed value of the Semantic Web is coming, but it is not coming because of the Semantic Web. The amount of meta-data we generate is increasing dramatically, and it is being exposed for consumption by machines as well as, or instead of, people. But it is being designed a bit at a time, out of self-interest and without regard for global ontology. It is also being adopted piecemeal, and it will bring with it with all the incompatibilities and complexities that implies. There are significant disadvantages to this process relative to the shining vision of the Semantic Web, but the big advantage of this bottom-up design and adoption is that it is actually working now. I also love his observation of what I would call the "Version 2.0 Syndrome" (in which the second version of a wildly successful new product is bloated, complex, expensive, therefore a failure, because the designer of the original product tried to improve it in every way): This, of course, is the standard Hail Mary play for anyone whose technology is caught on the wrong side of complexity. People pushing such technologies often make the "gateway drug" claim that rapid adoption of simple technologies is a precursor to later adoption of much more complex ones. Lotus claimed that simple internet email would eventually leave people clamoring for the more sophisticated features of CC:Mail (RIP), PointCast (also RIP) tried to label email a "push" technology so they would look like a next-generation tool rather than a dead-end, and so on. Unfortunately, I think Tim Berners-Lee (and the W3C) is somewhat bogged down in his own "Web version 2.0" quagmire: The Semantic Web. He created this wildly successful thing called the Web by creating something simple, easy to adopt, and flexible. Yet most of what the W3C has done since then seems complex, hard to adopt, and inflexible. Actually, this is possibly his second V2 ballyhoo, since he was involved in or at least promoted HTTP-NG (for Next Generation)--the aborted attempt to turn HTTP into an distributed OO protocol. Web services is succeeding where HTTP-NG failed. And something I haven't seen yet will succeed where W3C's Semantic Web fails. 10:48:08 AM