Fred On Something'sComments

What will be the next Web? A prediction

In answer to:

In order to mark things semantically, you don’t need Semantic Web… See, to me, this is marked semantically:

The [geography]river[/geography] is [color]green[/color].

It has nothing to do with the Semantic Web. People have been using Semantic Markup for years… think DocBook. Semantic Web is not about data, it is not about semantic markup… Don’t believe me? Search for intersection between database research and Semantic Web… there is hardly anything. SW aims to represent knowledge. It is a very different goal, at least from a philosophical point of view.

For the Semantic Web, whether you have 1 GB or 10000 GB of data, there is very little difference… precisely because it doesn’t care about data, only about knowledge…

The Semantic Web is based on RDF. It takes RDF as a foundation. RDF is not about semantic markup, but about representing knowledge using graphs, and eventually, building ontologies. I’d say most of Semantic Web activities have to do with ontologies or ontology-related issues.

“Giving meaning to things”, that’s what ontologies are… But it doesn’t help find things, per se. It is an approach, a vision, a form of philosophy. It is a way to write down knowledge. What do you do with knowledge if you want to share it? Well, you write an article using English. Some people say that this is good enough for humans, but we want machines to be able to consume this knowledge, so you need to express it formally… but can knowledge be expressed formally? What is knowledge?

So you see, Semantic Web is not about data, it is about knowledge representation.

Here’s the difference… The SW approach to managing 100 GB of MP3 would be to express relationships between the music and an ontology of music… that is, a formal description of what we know about music… maybe it would say that such a song is a form of jazz and so on.

But if your problem is that you want to quickly browse through your MP3 collection to find what you listened to 10 months ago… well, SW can’t help you there.

No… the revolution won’t be, I think, massive storage per se. It will be what we will do with it. Just like the Web wasn’t about the Web, but about what we could do with it.

Thank for the scratch course on SW

Semantic Web is the Web view semantically. The semantic is expressed with languages based on RDF and RDFS like OWL (for future compatibility). RDF is a suggestion, adopted, for the moment, by the community. Eventually, other languages could be developed and OWL ontologies would be, eventually, be able to import these future ontologies, wrote in another language, with some sort of transformation process.

But as I see SW, with the newcomer’s eyes, defining meaning to resources could help us in the search process. The search time I was talking about is not the “hardware” latency time, but the time a normal person would spend to search what he really need; relevant resources. For this tasks, SW would be able to help us; interacting as a translator between humans and resources, to bring relevant ones with the meaning hidden in the user’s query string.

“No… the revolution won’t be, I think, massive storage per se. It will be what we will do with it. Just like the Web wasn’t about the Web, but about what we could do with it.”

I agree with this assertion