Subscribe to RSS Feed158 weeks agoWhat is the future?
This is my first post here, I am new to web logging, yet I’ll get right to the business. I don’t enjoy wasting time (yours or mine), and I am quite hardcore about that. So I’ll put down what’s on my mind and if you have anything to say about that, please do.
There’s a lot of talking right now about what web will become, what web2.0 (the future web) is. People look at what’s new and trendy (think online social networks), get impressed and get an idea that it is the future. It’s not. If we were to have a more global view at it, we would see that the appeal of such services is in their game-like nature, it???s not what we (as in “most people using the web”) need by any measure. So, I believe, any time we look back at any influential big-scale change in computers and communication we will see that it was the most trivial next thing to do with technology available at that time. There are exceptions (Ray Kurzweil), but this rule is true most of the time.
The next thing to do is what we already can and we know we should.
We know that computers can be quite useful in joining different pieces of information. Computers could easily join different raw datasets but that’s useless, we only care about information, that is, data with semantics. Computer should join data in such ways that semantics are preserved. That task was solved many times before, usually by making a self-contained system, where every entity is assigned some metadata describing it. Such entity could be related to others by comparing the metadata. We can do similar things on the web, for example: “all these pages link to this URL thus they have something in common”. You see how one can deduce semantic relation by purely technical means. But this is not enough to allow computers do all they can to help us find related, relevant and important information, there’s more to it.
Next time I’ll write about what aspect of the web is largely responsible for its success, yet was not recognized for what it was by most people and also I will elaborate on why RDF will not succeed.