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> Very broadly, things on the Internet will be described with descriptor languages No. This will not happen. Look, before Google, internet search relied on pe

> Very broadly, things on the Internet will be described with descriptor languages No. This will not happen. Look, before Google, internet search relied on people adding meta tags to their pages so that the search engines could know what a page was about. You had two languages, one for humans, and one for computers. But people don't really care about having correct meta tags or headers or other invisible markers containing instructions for search engines, which is why Google steamrolled the market when it appeared. Google ignored all the instructions and instead analyzed the human language on web pages, and inferred relevance based on that. If semantic search engines or analyzers or other technology wants to become widespread, it cannot rely on extra markup, it cannot rely on people adding descriptors of meaning to the data it indexes, it has to determine that meaning from the data directly.

mindcrime 16y ago
Google ignored all the instructions and instead analyzed the human language on web pages, and inferred relevance based on that. Google are now at least partially on the Semantic Web bandwagon. They, as well as Yahoo, have been detecting, parsing, and using RDFa and microformats data - when present - for a while now, and using it to provide enhanced search results. See: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170 http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...
- henrikschroder 16y ago
  Yes, Google would be crazy to ignore good information and meta-data that is already there, but that doesn't change the fundamental problem: People don't give a shit about metadata.
  - mindcrime 16y ago
    In terms of people writing metadata into pages by hand, then yes, I agree. But in terms of programatically generating this stuff from data that's already in a database or what-have-you, then I think it will see growing adoption. The important thing here is to not commit the fallacy of the excluded middle... There's a place for the Semantic Web between "it's a total pipe dream and no part of it will ever come to fruition" and "it will be fully realized in exactly every detail as originally conceived by TBL." People are already using Semantic Web technologies to some extent, the open question now is "just how prevalent will this stuff eventually become?"
dantheman 16y ago
It's not about hand annotating; it's about exposing databases in a well defined way and using standard methods to describe structured data. Look at what dbpedia is able to do with wikipedia data.
jonmc12 16y ago
Thats a pretty myopic view of data annotation. There is a place on the web, and in the marketplace for data annotated through markup and through ontology, just like there is a need for automated annotation. Its all about the ROI of encoding the annotation. Granted, I'm not sure what role the semantic web, as defined, will play in this over the long term. And, to achieve optimal costs, I would tend to agree that the great majority of data will need to be annotated by machines. However, I think it is important to point out that human generated annotations like markup and ontology can play an important role in 2 scenarios: 1) places where there is not enough data to make meaningful machine inferences, 2) vertical domains that have very well-defined structure where the cost of human annotation is actually less than machine annotation.

mindcrime 16y ago

Google ignored all the instructions and instead analyzed the human language on web pages, and inferred relevance based on that. Google are now at least partially on the Semantic Web bandwagon. They, as well as Yahoo, have been detecting, parsing, and using RDFa and microformats data - when present - for a while now, and using it to provide enhanced search results. See: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170 http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...

henrikschroder 16y ago
Yes, Google would be crazy to ignore good information and meta-data that is already there, but that doesn't change the fundamental problem: People don't give a shit about metadata.
- mindcrime 16y ago
  In terms of people writing metadata into pages by hand, then yes, I agree. But in terms of programatically generating this stuff from data that's already in a database or what-have-you, then I think it will see growing adoption. The important thing here is to not commit the fallacy of the excluded middle... There's a place for the Semantic Web between "it's a total pipe dream and no part of it will ever come to fruition" and "it will be fully realized in exactly every detail as originally conceived by TBL." People are already using Semantic Web technologies to some extent, the open question now is "just how prevalent will this stuff eventually become?"

dantheman 16y ago

It's not about hand annotating; it's about exposing databases in a well defined way and using standard methods to describe structured data. Look at what dbpedia is able to do with wikipedia data.

jonmc12 16y ago

Thats a pretty myopic view of data annotation. There is a place on the web, and in the marketplace for data annotated through markup and through ontology, just like there is a need for automated annotation. Its all about the ROI of encoding the annotation. Granted, I'm not sure what role the semantic web, as defined, will play in this over the long term. And, to achieve optimal costs, I would tend to agree that the great majority of data will need to be annotated by machines. However, I think it is important to point out that human generated annotations like markup and ontology can play an important role in 2 scenarios: 1) places where there is not enough data to make meaningful machine inferences, 2) vertical domains that have very well-defined structure where the cost of human annotation is actually less than machine annotation.