This post is part contribution to the general Web 3.0 / Data-Web
/ Semantic Web discourse, and part experiment / demonstration of
the Data Web.
I came across a pretty deep comments trail about the
aforementioned items on Fred
Wilson's blog (aptly titled: A VC) under the subject heading:
Web 3.0 Is
The Semantic Web.
Contributions to the general Semantic Web discourse by way of
responses to valuable questions and commentary contributed by a
Semantic Web skeptic (Ed Addison who may be this Ed
Addison according to Google):
Ed, Responses to your points re. Semantic Web
Matrialization:
<< 1) ontologies can be created
and maintained by text extractors and crawlers" >>
Ontologies will be developed by Humans. This process has already
commenced and far more landscape has been covered that you may be
aware of. For instance, there is an Ontology for Online Communities
with Semantics factored in. More importantly, most Blogs, Wikis,
and other "points of presence" on the Web are already capable of
generating Instance Data for this Ontology by way of the underlying
platforms that drive these things. The Ontology is called: SIOC
(Semantically-Interlinked Online
Communities).
<< 2) the entire web can be
marked up, semantically indexed, and maintained by spiders without
human assistance >>
Most of it can, and already is :-) Human assistance should, and
would, be on an "exception basis" a preferred use of human time
(IMHO). We do not need to annotate the Web manually when this labor
intensive process can be automated (see my earlier comments).
<< 3) inference over the
semantic web does not require an extremely deep heuristic search
down multiple, redundant, cyclical pathways with many islands that
are disconnected >>
When you have a foundation layer of RDF Data (generated in the
manner I've discussed above), you then have a substrate that's far
more palatable to Intelligent Reasoning. Note, the Semantic Web is
made of many layers. The critical layer at this juncture is the
Data-Web (Web of RDF Data). Note, when I refer to RDF I am not
referring to RDF/XML the serialization format, I am referring to
the Data Model (a Graph).
<< 4) the web becomes smart
enough to eliminate websites or data elements that are incorrect,
misleading, false, or just plain lousy >>
The Semantic Web vision is not about eliminating Web Sites (The
Hypertext-Document-Web). It is simply about adding another
dimension of interaction to the Web. This is just like the
Services-Web dimension as delivered by Web 2.0.
We are simply evolving within an innovation continuum. There is no
mutual exclusivity about any of the Web Dimensions since they
collectively provide us with a more powerful infrastructure for
building and exploiting "collective wisdom".
As for the Data-Web experiment part of this post, I would expect
to see this post exposed as another contribution to the Data-Web
via the PingTheSemanticWeb notification
service :-) Implying, that all the relevant parts of this
conversation are in a format (Instance Data for the SIOC Ontology) that is available
for further use in a myriad of forms.