Semantic Web Gathers Substance

David Hersey writes "ADTMag reports that the semantic web technologies are taking real form in the wake of recent W3C approvals and early pioneering work by vendors such as IBM, Boeing, Adobe and others. These technologies have been developing for several years. When and If the finally take form, they hold the potential of raising the capabilties of internet users and internet technology applications to levels that are today impractical due to the web's document-centric architecture."

Godel's Theorem?

[ClosedSource]

I heard that the Semantic Web violates Godel's Theorem but I didn't get any details. Any comments?

Re:Godel's Theorem?

[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION]

I never heard of that, but I suppose that saying a Semantic Web is in principle capable of more than the "Regular Web" probably violates something Turing said. It seems to me that XML is poorly designed to serve a marginally useful purpose. Why the hell does it have to look like HTML? Instead of all those starting and closing tags tripling the size of my documents, why not just use white space and parentheses or brackets so that it could have maintained some semblance of still being human readable?

I'm

Re:Godel's Theorem?

[Asmodeus]

"Why the hell does it have to look like HTML? Instead of all those starting and closing tags tripling the size of my documents, why not just use white space and parentheses or brackets so that it could have maintained some semblance of still being human readable? "

Like lisp S-Expressions?

(tag 'data "other data" (sub-tag (list a b c)))

Asmo

Re:Godel's Theorem?

[thoth39]

I don't understand the problem with XML.
I mean, if this format of data-storing was that bad, why the hell is SGML being used to this day?

Anyway, the point of XML is not to automagically be meaningful for every computer software, it is to be parseable by every computer software. At least, for every XML parser computer software.

It means you will be able to feed it into a DOM tree and analyze it no matter what schema it conforms to -- no matter how many schemas it conforms to either -- hell, if you're nice t

Re:Godel's Theorem?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not buying into the magical benefits of XML at all. Just because a file is written in XML doesn't mean your computer magically knows what it means (if that's what the semantic web is, then yeah, that violates both Godel's Theorem and common sense.)

Well obviously, but if you've got a ASCII file format vs a binary one - which do you think a developer will find easier to understand?

XML is just the next step above ASCII. It's some simple grammar. It's hyped -- but it's still a good step.

Perhaps using a

Re:Godel's Theorem?

[Uzziel]

You're not giving us a lot to go on here. How does it violate the Incompleteness Theorem?

The semantic web is not a procedural system; it's a method of encoding information. Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem is about mathematical systems and their ability to describe certain truth values.

I don't see any immediate connection between the one and the other.

Re:Godel's Theorem?

[ClosedSource]

Well, I said I didn't have the details, which is why I asked the question in the first place.

I seems to me that a system that encodes information and then performs operations on it can be considered a mathematical system, so I don't think the semantic web is necessarily free from the implications of Godel's theorm.

For some examples...

[tcopeland]

...check out various tools on SemWebCentral [semwebcentral.org].

For example, you can browse the GForge project listing using OWL [daml.org] - more precisely, using an HTMLized version of the ObjectViewer [semwebcentral.org].

Information architechure

[heldlikesound]

IA is a new interest of mine, specifically on the web...

My favorite sites are:

boxesandarrows.com
zeldman.com
alistapart.com
http://argus-acia.com/white_papers/iaglossary.htm l
http://iaslash.org/

Viability

[!3ren]

Ultimately though, the question is whether people actually _want_ to enable the ability to reuse and recombine their data.
Within your own data, tools to enable you to analyse and reuse your data are highly prized, but enabling anyone else to use your valuable data to their own ends benefits (almost) noone. (IMHO)

hmmm, seems fragile

[jkorty]

The Semantic Web seems to be a generalized version of metatagging combined with a search engine tailored to the format. To work well, this requires 1) everyone to think hard and attach to their pages the appropriate semantics, and 2) that there are few people in the world that deliberately associate all sorts of junk with their web pages in order to get the page to appear in everyone's semantic search.

Re:hmmm, seems fragile

[BorgCopyeditor]

To work well, this requires 1) everyone to think hard and attach to their pages the appropriate semantics,

Exactly. Given that people seem largely unable even to mark up documents with HTML properly, my hopes for the proper implementation of a significantly more "robust" ontology are somewhat dim.

Re:hmmm, seems fragile

[anomalous cohort]

The ubiquitousness of OWL/RDF on the web would, IMHO, be tied to two things; adoption by a large search engine such as google and the availability of a cool tool that would make the authoring process easy.

Imagine a mind mapping [mind-map.com] tool like freemind [sourceforge.net] that could export to OWL. That would work for static content. Content publishers would do it for the same reason that they include keyword meta tags in their pages now.

Re:hmmm, seems fragile

[K-Man]

The GIS community went through a similar thing with various metadata initiatives. People can put anything on a map, and the government tried to standardize its map layers into a centralized ontology, i.e. one type for streams, one for roads, one for pipes, etc. Unfortunately it became incredibly difficult to manage, and there were full-time data managers working to fit things together.

To quote Ted Nelson:

Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged -- people keep pretending they can make things de

duh, INTRANETS

[Ars-Fartsica]

For the internet this will never take off, the disparate sites on the web will never grok it in a unified fashion. In Intranets though there can be goals, policies, centralized design and predetermined semantics. In these environments this type of stuff makes sense - there is a need and a return on investment.

It seems like a meaningless concept

[K-Man]

So far the biggest semantic web project I've seen is IBM's WebFountain, which is basically a big sed script that goes through the web and wraps each stock phrase it finds with meta tags, and enters them in a big database. It seems like a reasonable phrase search would accomplish the same thing.

Not very realistic

[Frans Faase]

In a sense I am a great fan of the idea of a semantic web. But I am affraid that it does not work in reality. As soons as it gains some momentum it will be hyjacked by large companies (MS, Yahoo) trying to commercialize it and by small companies trying to misuse it (spam).

Most people don't get it yet.

[metoc]

The concept of the Semantic Web is still in its infancy. Like many technologies before (XML, HTTP, Open Source, the "Internet", etc.) it will be a few more years before it becomes obvious.

The main difference between the semantic web and web pages with meta-tags is that the current approach gets you hundreds of useless hits on google. You should by able to say "I want to fly to Whistler" and not get references to zippers, paintings and insects. The semantic web will allow you to do that.

Re:Most people don't get it yet.

[shivanan]

You should by able to say "I want to fly to Whistler" and not get references to zippers, paintings and insects. The semantic web will allow you to do that.
As someone previously posted, this mandates that people actually put meaningfull (read: not misleading) information in their meta data tags.
I always figured the main advantage of the semantic web was that by providing data in machine-parseable format, you can have the computer automate a lot of stuff for you.
I.e, "book tickets for me on the earliest f

Impractical?

[Nippoo]

Why do they say "Impractical"? Why would id be impractical to have a semantic web?