Markoff’s front page opus in the Times on Web 3.0 has blogistan infected with a serious case of the vapors over the next big thing. This time its the “semantic” web renamed with a new dot.release moniker and blessed with the pixie dust of artificial intelligence. Whatever … while Markoff has been way ahead of the curve in the past — with the first mainstream media mention of the Web in ’93, etc. — this one seems to be much ado about nothing, and timed to prick the Web 2.0 O’Reilly conference bubble as that overwrought conference concluded last week.
“Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.”
The notion, as I understand it, is that the act of searching becomes more relevant in the returns due to some machine intelligence assembling a cross-site result that is tuned more accurately to the searcher’s intentions. Whatever. Markoff may be onto something, but I didn’t reach the end of the piece with any “aha” moment of revelation.
aahhhhh, how i love tuples.
my first exposure to the semantic web was at the w3c conf in Amsterdam in 2000. it’s very interesting. check out the demo on semantic publishing…
check out Resource Definition Frameworks (RDF’s like DublinCore). and Ontologies, OWL.
http://www.bigblogzoo.com/
http://web2express.org/demo
Markoff is getting righteously flamed out here on the west coast for his piece and for his extraneoius intejection of the much feared NSA aand CIA. Weiner jumped all over his ass this morning for using the same old sources It’s funny to watch the flames build around this piece.
Jim