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Tim Berners-Lee Discusses the Future of the Web
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Jul 10, 2007 12:01 PM
from the i've-heard-of-those-intertrucks dept.
from the i've-heard-of-those-intertrucks dept.
maximus1 writes "In an interview with IT World, Tim Berners-Lee explains his vision of the Semantic Web. He says: 'The Semantic Web is going to take off particularly when we see people using it for data processing, when we see people using it in more and more things, adding personal data, adding files to government data.' His position on net neutrality: 'We've seen cable companies trying to prevent using the Internet for Internet phones. I am concerned about this, and am working, with many other committed people, to keep it from happening. I think it's very important to keep an open Internet for whoever you are. This is called Net neutrality. It's very important to preserve Net neutrality for the future.' And a fun tidbit — He mentions his 1989 memo to his boss at CERN that described his vision for the Web."
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Why the Semantic Web Will Fail 179 comments
Jack Action writes "A researcher at Canada's National Research Council has a provocative post on his personal blog predicting that the Semantic Web will fail. The researcher notes the rising problems with Web 2.0 — MySpace blocking outside widgets, Yahoo ending Flickr identities, rumors Google will turn off its search API — and predicts these will also cripple Web 3.0." From the post: "The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating. There is no way they: (1) would agree on web standards (hah!) (2) would adopt a common vocabulary (you don't say) (3) would reliably expose their APIs so anyone could use them (as if)."
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Semantic Search Points To Better Relevancy 90 comments
ReadWriteWeb writes in to tell us about an article by Dr. Riza C. Berkan, founder and CEO of hakia.com, describing the promise of and potential for semantic search. This approach to providing more on-target search results contrasts with the dream of the semantic Web. Semantic search doesn't require all the Web page authors in the world to begin adding metadata; but it's not a sure thing that the researchers now developing the idea will get it right.
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Robert Cailliau Talks With WikiNews 65 comments
David Gerard writes "Wikipedia's citizen journalism sister site, Wikinews, has a long and interesting interview with Robert Cailliau, who worked with Tim Berners-Lee to create the World Wide Web. 'I also remember a big resistance against PostScript, but what do we see now? PDF everywhere. Fortunately PDF is an open standard and it's fairly elegant, but it could have turned out much worse. SVG did not make it. Tim, who had a longer experience with the internet world, convinced me that the web could only survive if all the code was freely available for everyone who wanted to tinker with it. In 1992-1993 I then worked patiently for some 6 months with CERN's Legal Service to draft a document that put the source code into the public domain. This also implied working to convince the management, up to the Directors, of the need to do so. The result was the document signed on 30 April 1993 that gave the WWW technology to the world.'"
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Another year... (Score:2, Insightful)
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My predictions -- write these down! (Score:5, Insightful)
It will also have an interesting side effect where long-time users sit down to write a post intended to be humorous and end up making themselves a little depressed.
Re:My predictions -- write these down! (Score:4, Funny)
Dude, you are so anti-semantic!
Parent
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The internet was about the individual in the 90s. The 21st century is all about corporations and commercialism, while convincing individuals that it's really
Re:My predictions -- write these down! (Score:5, Insightful)
The 21st century is all about corporations and commercialism, while convincing individuals that it's really "their" society, political systems, freedom, etc.
There, fixed that for you.
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My own predictions (Score:5, Insightful)
- The Net will continue to feature more video, become even more interactive, and the difference between local apps and the Internet will continue to be blurred little-by-little.
- Blogs will continue in various fashions, from vlogs (video blogs) to audlogs (audio logs) to iBlogs (blogs with highly-interactive content, including even 3D simulated environments). Apple will sue the first person that uses the term 'iBlog'.
- Devices will continue to converge. Specialized devices will exist, and regular desktop and laptop computers will continue to exist, but the differences between them will blur as it becomes apparent that the only difference from a practical standpoint will be form factor and user interface.
- The telcos will become less relevant as Net connectivity becomes all that matters.
- THe mafiaa becomes irrelevant as people become increasingly connected to artists.
- Spam will become ever increasingly more annoying as advertising will even start popping up on your roll of toilet 'paper'.
Parent
Re:My own predictions (Score:4, Funny)
A quick Google search shows that you're safe, anyway.
Parent
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I'm basically theorizing that with KDE and Mozilla, among many others, combining to support the Semantic Desktop and web; with Apple having implemented KDE code in Dashboard and Safari and working with them, the Semantic Web has a chance to at least be tried. One day Opera and IE will s
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Heaps of people remain on slow connections to the Internet across the world meaning that they are cut off from more and more of this new "good" Internet.
Considering that it is impossible to get cheap broadband (and the only way to get broadband is satellite) in so many places in Australia (a "first world" "developed" country) and the situation is apparently similar in the USA, I think we should focus on actually getting people connected before we start going on about video and interactive web prog
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not buzz-rific enough (Score:5, Funny)
That vision is nonsense. I don't see any Web 2.0 buzzwords on that paper anywhere.
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Maybe We should be talking about terms like "Web (2.0 + i)" and "Web (2.0 + 2.0i)"?
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The nerve. (Score:2)
rejected (Score:2, Insightful)
Businesses actively work to prevent other sites from scraping content. They certainly aren't going to spend extra effort to support it!
Users care about presentation. Looks are everything. Web developers know this, or at least the marketing people in charge of web design know it.
Re:rejected (Score:5, Insightful)
Give me a break
In fact, Google is a model here. They are making it ridiculously easy to get access to data in all kinds of formats. I can create a google spreadsheet and actually share individual cells and ranges of cells with anyone else on the internet, and it even retains the dynamic calculations from the main spreadsheet even when you aren't displaying the rest of the cells. It's actually ridiculously cool if you think about it.
The smart companies absolutely will make it easier and easier to access their data in all kinds of formats.
Parent
Re:rejected (Score:5, Insightful)
These user-driven efforts are where the tagging and semantic web will probably start. If Wikipedia contributors care to take the time to write good articles, then surely they will also be willing to semantically tag articles. (In fact Wikipedia already has alot of semantic tagging.) Similarly creative commons artists are actively tagging their works with machine-readable creative-commons tags. Social sites like Flickr are also doing alot of useful tagging.
So businesses may resist it... but as long as users care about it (and are given easy to tools to make it happen--like wikis), then this semantic web can be created. Once it expands, businesses will have to play along or risk being left behind and ignored by the web-users who come to depend upon the power of the Semantic Web. So, whether they like it or not, businesses will have to connect to the semantic web and add to its descriptive power, or else they will lose all their customers.
And, yes, I'm keenly aware of the flip-side, which is that businesses will then try to commoditize and monetize these technologies, sometimes in bad ways, like Spam. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. But I don't think businesses will be able to stop it.
I disagree. Or rather, I think that describes only some users. There are plenty of users who are care about content. (Wikipedia and free software are examples of the resultant projects.) So even if many (or most) users don't care about the semantic web, as long as some dedicated group does care, then it will expand and everyone (including users who don't care about the underlying implementation details) will benefit.
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There's a
Semantic Web == Exchange (Score:2)
So, for example, if you are looking at a Web page, you find a talk that you want to take, an event that you want to go to. The event has a place and has a time and it has some people associated with it. But you have to read the Web page and separately open your calendar to put the information on it. And if you want to find the page on the Web you have to type the address again until the page turns back. If you want the corporate details about people, you have to cut and paste the information from a
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I wouldn't call it impossible. It
Re:Semantic Web !== Exchange (Score:2)
Achieving it for 'stuff' in general, which seems to be the aim of the Semantic Web, is probably flat-out impossible.
Why should it be impossible?
I always thought that this kind of thing is what standards are for. So lets create a 5-tuple with (date, place,event,persons,data), push this data through some xml into something called OEDF (Open Event data format) and Voila, tag it to every mentioning of said event. You just have to click ok 5 times(remember the first time Fry visited the Net in the year 3000), if your app detects such an oedf-object anywhere, and voila, with the magic of Ajax, Web2.0 and some scripting the
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Is this really a problem with the Semantic Web?
Seems to me that its a problem with the people that are reacting emotionally to TBLs descriptions of the ultimate goal without paying attention to the progress in that direction, and with the people who think that the Semantic Web is somehow all or nothing such that if the vision is less than entirely acheived, the effort toward it
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I doubt it's impossible. You just need some intelligent filtering algorithms. Think of Google's fault-tolerant searches: if I accidentally spell 'Mississippi' as 'Misisipi' Google will ask, 'did you mean Mississippi?'. It's not exactly rocket science. And it's not much of a leap from that to software that can look at a web page displaying, say, times and dates and addresses and, even tho
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I dunno about "impossible": web browsers, MIME types, and helper applications have done quite a bit of it for a lot wider variety of disparate types of linked information than MS Office has. I'm not
Re:Semantic Web == Exchange (Score:4, Interesting)
You're talking about OLE, where Microsoft only allowed the combination and transfer of data objects (and otherwise reusing application code) from one application to another. You could take an Excel worksheet and paste it into a Word document. That's pretty cool, and at useful once in a long while, but it's hardly smart enough to be compared to Semantic Web. The web equivalent is simply embedding images and Flash games- i.e. Web 1.0.
At work I get many emails about upcoming internal conferences, tech talks, vendor presentations and such. They all come in the form of an Outlook email, but contain data including event title, date/time, location, and more recognizable bits of information. But when I drag the email onto a calendar folder to create a "Meeting" object, none of the data is put in the appropriate fields. That's the kind of thing Semantic Web is supposed do.
The stuff Microsoft had was useful, but it's obsolete today. It only provided the ability to share data between one application and another application. Today we need to share data between any of millions of applications (web sites), and we can't afford to write dedicated code for each one of those. We need the Semantic Web.
> Achieving it for 'stuff' in general, which seems to be the aim of the Semantic Web, is probably flat-out impossible.
"Ingenuity and resourcefulness" my foot. You don't even make an argument against it, not to mention any attempt at proof. Since don't even understand what the Semantic Web is about, how could you possibly dismiss it so casually?
But I must stop and thank you. Pessimists like you make us real technologists so much cooler. It's great to hear people say "it can't be done," because it makes solving those problems so much sweeter. My prediction: expect some serious in-your-face fist-pumping.
Parent
Whew (Score:5, Funny)
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The new Symantec Web 2008 is much better, and can do so much more in one package!
Baah - Semantic Web is overrated (Score:3, Insightful)
But give me something to work with the vast amounts of unstructured information out there - not just the generic header information surrounding the really interesting stuff. I'm just hoping that Web 3.0 focuses more on this area to support a real information revolution rather than just over-formatting the already semi-structured pieces of data that we already know about.
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Google is spending a ton of money working on exactly that.
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Yeah - but I was thinking of something beyond keyword or proximity search. Something, er, semantic. But actually semantic, not like the semantic web. Something that could spot correlations across complex documents or organize the information beyond a top 10 list of hits or actually answer questions. While useful, keyword search hardly provides the rich semantic environment needed to organize the world's information.
I'm sure Google is working on t
Building a knowledge commons (Score:3, Insightful)
1. trust: how do we keep people from publishing purposefully wrong meta data?
2. how do we reason with a web's worth of data? Even with recent advances in technology for descriptive logic reasoner's, reasoning with web scale data is not even close to being possible. Even the RDF extracted from Wikipedia is way too large to reason over.
3. tension between formal standards and "grass roots" bottom up approaches that work, but may not scale. I expect that some "grass roots" efforts will become very popular and perhaps replace RDF and OWL as the semantic web data model. Speaking of which, one of my favorite ideas that I have seen widely discussed: extending HTML/XHTML so that meta data is encoded in standardized attribute names representing agreement/disagreement, trust level, type of linked information, time stamp, etc. Combine this with RDF, but have a better way to embed RDF into HTML and XHTML.
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We don't. RDF triples are claims about specific resources, including other websites, data sources, or even specific other RDF triples. No reason you can't used signed RDF to make accountable claims about the trustworthiness of resources (metadata sources at any level of specificity down to
Talk about prior art!!! (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be cool to read the rest of the document for other prior net related prior art?
Let's take a microsecondext (Score:2)
1) Porn - check
2) Email - check
3) Spam - check
4) Viruses and Trojans - check
5) 99.8% of all blogs being dull, pointless and full of misplaced ego - check
Semantics - nope: people will still mix up 'effect' and 'affect', and use 'loose' when they mean 'lose'
Next!
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deployment (Score:2)
semantic web is being invented now (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want a glimpse of what the semantic web will look like, fire up Google Earth. Sure it is proprietary but it is also massively distributed meta information from all over the internet aggregated into one coherent view overlayed on top of the world. Imagine that based on open standards, and you get an idea of where we could be going.
Emerging standards such as microformats, atom, openid may lack the glamour of all encompassing ontologies and the mighty AI of reasoning engines and what not. But, the bottom line is that they are a hell of a lot more practical and pragmatic, solve real problems, and you can use them right now. These emerging standards are not perfect or even complete but people are definitely using them to enrich information on the internet by cross referencing; by tagging; by labeling etc. Defacto standardization outside W3C by killer applications is driving this lower case semantic web. The best thing the W3C could do and currently does not is to endorse, facilitate and promote this work.
Tim Berners Lee of course contributed his bit by inventing the web browser + very naive markup language (aka HTML 1.0) in 1989. I give him credit for his vision then but this article reads like a very confused mix of ideals and vague concepts and does not seem visionary at all. The man tries to explain things in terms of databases, files and links and somehow the wizards at MIT are going to provide the magic pixie dust that turns it into something beautiful. That's nice but the how part remains ever elusive.
The Web? (Score:2)
I remember the Web. That was when there were still ISPs and telecoms, right? Back when the big corporations tried to figure out how to triple, and quadruple charge for everything. When governments started taxing every packet. Back before the Mesh. Yeah, that sucked.
Semantic Web in use for at least a decade. (Score:2)
The semantic web has been in use since somewhere between 1996 and 1998, since Google relies on the semanticity of the HTML hyperlink syntax.
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The Semantic Web has been a reality for years, used for individual projects assumptions can be made about the data coming in. See Visualising the Semantic Web [amazon.com] ed. Geroimeno and Chen (Springer-Verlag, 2005) for tonnes of real-world examples, and the book's even reached a second edition from further examplary work being done. Just because high-schoolers on MySpace users aren't sending valid RDF back and forth amongst themselves doesn't mean that the co
not as offtopic as it seemed (Score:2, Informative)
I was typing two things at once and only proofread for typos. Not coherence unfortunately.
Basically, while not challenging OSX or Windows, KDE4 has a lot of users realative to the number of users who would normally be involved in implementing semantic anything.
At the same time as the semantic desktop will be available, the functionality will b