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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Semantic Web permathread, iteration n+1 (was Re:
 >> Google is to "the semantic web" as CompuServe was to "the web". > words, what makes a SemWeb database more useful than the > technologies we are using now? Where will it take us today? > What will we implement that we aren't already implementing? Well, I chose the analaogy because it highlights what I think is the critical disctinction. CompuServe and others had hyperlinked content prior to the WWW. You could argue (and people *did* argue) that what CompuServe provided years earlier was actually *superior* to what the WWW offered initially. There was a specific quality about WWW that excited us in those early days, despite the relatively crude quality compared to CompuServe, and which made it clear that CompuServe would eventually fade. It's the same quality that I think differentiates the vision of "semantic web" from utilities like Google (or MSN Search for that matter). The critical quality is universal openness. To get hypermedia published on CompuServe or AOL, you had to strike a deal with the network. Hyperlinks in AOL looked different from hyperlinks in CompuServe; one system could not link to the other. These systems relegated you to status of sharecropper on the network's walled garden. By the same token, if I want to get a new field of metadata published in Google's index, it's even more difficult. I don't even know who to pay. The engine indexes things like pagerank, related pages, keywords. But if I want any other information in there, I have to get a job as a janitor at Google's offices and hack the source code. Now, if I build my own engine for storing additional metadata like annotations, ratings, etc., I have to build adapters (and probably violate some EULA) to get that to integrate with Google or MSN Search. These systems are all walled gardens. I'm not saying that the "walled gardens" have no value. In fact, they are extraordinarily valuable. But they are sitting in exactly the same position CompuServe was sitting 10 years ago. People often focus on the current value, and argue that "the landlord is a benificient landlord, so what possible benefit would I get by abandoning the walled garden for some university-produced science project?". But I remember these same arguments about CompuServe; I'll concede that Google is very valuable, but I think that universally open metadata network will be immeasurably more valuable. When we talk about "semantic web", we are talking about the vision of universally open metadata, NOT about walled gardens like Google. It doesn't matter whether or not you believe the vision to be attainable or not; the vision is what it is, and it would be mischaracterizing the vision to say that a walled garden somehow fulfills that vision. Saying "the semantic Web is already here, and it is called Google" is like saying "The WWW is already here, and it is called CompuServe". Both statements are incorrect, in that they assume away the fundamental thing that characterizes the web and semantic web; their universality. 
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