Clay Shirky has written an elegant denunciation of the semantic web. He asks "What is the Semantic Web good for?" And answers himself later on:
The Semantic Web's philosophical argument—the world should make more sense than it does—is hard to argue with. The Semantic Web, with its neat ontologies and its syllogistic logic, is a nice vision. However, like many visions that project future benefits but ignore present costs, it requires too much coordination and too much energy to effect in the real world, where deductive logic is less effective and shared worldview is harder to create than we often want to admit.
The gist of his argument is that the semantic web is basically about reasoning (i.e., good old fashioned syllogistic deduction) from meta-data to provide answers to users' queries, and that deduction, in general, and meta-data, too, have little in the way to offer in a real-world kind of way to solve the kinds of questions that people really ask, or want to ask computers. AI is impossible and so is information retrieval in the Popular Mechanics starry-eyed sort of way. Too bad. [via Akma]
[Addendum 11/13/03: Mamamusings has collected a bunch of links that respond to Shirky. Should make good reading.]
Posted by jim at November 8, 2003 10:02 AM | TrackBack