Jabberwocky
Apparently, Gordon and I are behind the times. While we’ve been caught up in a discussion of Enterprise 2.0, ReadWriteWeb reports that the folks at Project10x have already mapped out the landscape for Web 3.0 and Web 4.0. Gosh, that’s embarrassing.
It’s almost as embarrassing as if we just uttered the phrase “Black is the new black” when “X is the new Y” jokes are as yesterday as “that’s so yesterday” jokes.
I’d like to see what a Web 3.0 semantic parsing engine would make of that last sentence. I doubt a linguistics program would come close to understanding what I meant by it. Even us humans have trouble seeing sarcasm in print sometimes. And that’s only one of the reasons why I’m skeptical of the semantic web concept.
Chief among those reasons is the notion that we ought to change the world wide web such that every URL comes with a list of ontologically correct statements that describe the related content in a structured way so that computers can draw meaningful inferences from it.
See, the semantic web is easy! What? Oh, OK, I’ll pause here while you look up the word ontology.
Still not enlightened? Well, here’s the basic idea: The Internet contains a wealth of information. Humans use this data in all sorts of interesting ways for a bewildering array of different uses. At times, though, all that searching and skimming we do can get a little tedious. Wouldn’t it be great if you had a little robot (excuse me, an intelligent agent) that could surf the web for you and assemble all the information you needed? All we’d need to do is restructure all of our messy webpages into a consistent, logical format, build a parsing tool able to read, relate, and understand the information, and construct an artificial intelligence that can apply this knowledge in the context of your daily life. No problem. The scientific community will wrap that up sometime after they finish working on Cold Fusion, perpetual motion, and that personal jetpack they promised me.
I think there are three faulty premises at work here:
1. The majority of us humans are willing to adjust our habits to accommodate our computer tools. If the history of design is any guide, it is the tools that adjust to conform to human habits, not the other way around. We’re not about to redo all the pages on the Internet just so our computers can do a little surfing in their downtime. While certain high-value datasets will incorporate the technologies of the semantic web — RDF, OWL, SPARQL, etc. — the vast majority of pages on the Internet will be plain old human-readable text. Despite considerable investment in the well-understood technologies of relational databases and document management, it’s unstructured information that’s outstripping the structured kind in today’s enterprises.
2. The Web 2.0 revolution was about technology. It wasn’t. The technical ability to blog, to comment on articles, to participate in a social network, to join a discussion forum, and to contribute to wikis, were all secondary to our human desire to communicate and collaborate with other folks. Web 2.0 provided new and interesting ways for people to interact with other people. The semantic web promises new ways for computers to interact with other computers, or, at best, new ways for people to interact with computers. Those interactions might be interesting to us academics, technophiles, and geeks, but I doubt the general public will find them terribly engaging.
3. You can have human intelligence without being human. I’m a fan of Issac Asimov. I’d like to believe that, one day, we can build a machine that can simulate the reasoning ability of the human mind. But I’m also a fan of Douglas Adams, so I believe that any thing we build that thinks like us would also exhibit all of our emotions, idiosyncrasies, and eccentricities. And for all the time, trouble, and expense it would take to create such a machine, creating and training another human would be much easier (and more fun).
Don’t get me wrong; I think that a semantic web could have real benefits. But does it have the potential to be as game-changing as Web 2.0? I think I’d defer to HAL 9000 for the answer:
“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
It also overlooks the fact that many, many people find the act of searching for information enlightening and worthwhile in any case.
I mean, I’m pretty good at using “Dominant Internet Search Engine”TM I can construct a query that will return one or maybe two results that perfectly give me the information I was looking for.
But I hardly ever do that – because it’s all the other odd things I discovers while doing the search, the things I learn, the answers to questions I didn’t know I had, that making searching the internet fun…
[...] is half the fun. Posted on January 24, 2008 by beatonl Over at the Infovark site Dean has an interesting post on the semantic web including and analysis on why he thinks there are some faulty concepts particularly around the idea [...]
The one time I exchanged a series of email with TimBL (spring ‘96) we talked about “task-oriented” VS “brochure”. Eleven years ago, and I’m still not seeing task-oriented people pressing Web2.0 types for working solutions.
Anybody who’s found gems and other treasures just wandering the stacks of a good library know how rewarding a random walk through a good set of links can be. But I can’t help thinking that has skewed intererest. /Digg/ really doesn’t relate to business processes, or intelligence analysis, or decision support … but it sure is popular!
You really seem to have a grasp of this stuff. So I’m doubly disappointed to see you hoe into point #3 with such gusto.
To be frank: that’s symptomatic of BluePill.
have fun … I guess
–bentrem
OMG! I had the right instinct with “disappointed” but woa! I totally skipped over “I think there are three faulty premises at work here”
wooof …
… I’ll just stop now and read more of your blog.
cheers
*wooot!*
ben
woah… total coincidence that we blogged on the same subject within a matter of hours…
welcome to the Semantic Web Power Haters Club!