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Thursday, October 2, 2008
Hopefully H.G. Wells and Vannevar Bush had more insight than I do
I confess: I do not believe in a Semantic Web. I sincerely hope to be proven wrong--we should all hope to have information resources that powerful--but I do not believe, given my understanding of the way the Web works, the way search engines work, and computers' consistently poor understanding of natural language, that we should expect anything like Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila's (2001) almost utopian ideas of information retrieval systems within our lifetimes. I also have serious doubts about Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) or Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) ever being implemented consistently, correctly, and for large enough portions of the Web to make a real difference; again, I want to be proven wrong.
Brooks seems, almost, to agree: he discusses the untrustworthiness of user-supplied metadata and search engines' habit of ignoring, or at least devaluing, it. In the past, indexing was done by trustworthy experts, who "possess[ed] a special skill for denoting the meaning of text," and if they failed, they could be found and held accountable. Indexing now is done by various algorithms looking at the content of and links between web pages--and it is imperfect (2004). For the Semantic Web, as Berners-Lee et al. (2001) envisioned it, indexing would be done by the content creators, whom Google correctly distrusts, or perhaps by users of the content, via social tagging/bookmarking. This last approach has shown real promise (Wu), though I have a theory--unexplored in any papers I could find--that the Matthew Effect would apply, and most content would remain untagged by anyone except its creator.
Despite my skepticism, I find the topic fascinating and would love to design technology to mitigate some of these hurdles.
Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., and Lassila, O. (2001, May 17). "The semantic Web: A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities," The Scientific American, 284(5), 34+ [Available here]
Brooks, T.A. (2004). "The nature of meaning in the Age of Google," Information Research, 9(3) paper 180. [Available here]
Wu, X., Zhang, L., Yu, Y. "Exploring social annotations for the semantic web," Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web, May 23-26, 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland
Brooks seems, almost, to agree: he discusses the untrustworthiness of user-supplied metadata and search engines' habit of ignoring, or at least devaluing, it. In the past, indexing was done by trustworthy experts, who "possess[ed] a special skill for denoting the meaning of text," and if they failed, they could be found and held accountable. Indexing now is done by various algorithms looking at the content of and links between web pages--and it is imperfect (2004). For the Semantic Web, as Berners-Lee et al. (2001) envisioned it, indexing would be done by the content creators, whom Google correctly distrusts, or perhaps by users of the content, via social tagging/bookmarking. This last approach has shown real promise (Wu), though I have a theory--unexplored in any papers I could find--that the Matthew Effect would apply, and most content would remain untagged by anyone except its creator.
Despite my skepticism, I find the topic fascinating and would love to design technology to mitigate some of these hurdles.
Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., and Lassila, O. (2001, May 17). "The semantic Web: A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities," The Scientific American, 284(5), 34+ [Available here]
Brooks, T.A. (2004). "The nature of meaning in the Age of Google," Information Research, 9(3) paper 180. [Available here]
Wu, X., Zhang, L., Yu, Y. "Exploring social annotations for the semantic web," Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web, May 23-26, 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland
Labels: libraries, technology
posted by Coral # 10:16 PM 
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