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

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.