DMReview

“The semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. It is a collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial partners. It is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which integrates a variety of applications using XML for syntax and URIs for naming. ”

“The semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.” – Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila, The Semantic Web, Scientific American, May 2001

The semantic Web would really be nice, except for a few small problems. First, how do you get the cow back in the barn? Are any of the 90 billion pages currently in existence going to convert to XML, RDF and other semantic technologies? And, are those people that wouldn’t take the time to properly tag their content in simple metatag format, now going to try to figure out how ontology frameworks work? The reality is that the meta data information on the Internet is more of a social issue than a technical one. Web authors simply don’t document their pages with well-formed meta data; not because they don’t understand how to “tag” it but because they are lazy. Yes, there are a few organizations that try to cheat the technology by falsifying their meta, data but this is a very small percentage. The vast majority of us fail to “tag” our content because we simply choose not to. Unfortunately, today there is no real benefit to actually documenting with good meta data since most search engines fail to process the tagged information. Unless the semantic Web figures out a way that classification and documentation can be done seamlessly and easily, the semantic Web is decades away from any form of success.

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