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> meaning is something that is an emergent property, not something that's hard-coded into the raw data. Unless you store everything in unstructured text, it is
by bct 19y ago
> meaning is something that is an emergent property, not something that's hard-coded into the raw data.
Unless you store everything in unstructured text, it is hard-coded into the data. When you stick an article in a database, you're saying "this is a title", "this is who wrote it", etc.
- wheels 19y agoSure. A lot of stuff is structured and some standardization may happen there. But let's say that somebody posts a really good comment here that becomes an authoritative source on something or another. You're not going to get the sort of fine-grained meta data that the semantic web expects. Titles are boring. We can get that from HTML already. And web search got a lot better when that and a lot of other structural metadata started being almost wholesale ignored. Where I could see the semantic web catching on would be in things like Amazon shops or something, where it was advantageous to be able to provide a homogenous interface to a given set of structured data. On the other hand, it wouldn't be in Amazon's interest for that to be the case, because for them the world works better when they get to define the rules and the API and it doesn't easily transfer to another store.
- bct 19y ago> You're not going to get the sort of fine-grained meta data that the semantic web expects. Like what? Articles was a bad choice of example for me to use, because it's a common misconception that the Semantic Web is about making it easier to find documents. That's part of it, but (IMO) data about things is a lot more interesting than data about documents.