A Semantic Web
ZDNet has a short article about Tim Berners-Lee’s talk about a semantic web wiki.. As a proponent of collaboration and artificial intelligence Tim’s stance on the subject is obvious.. A semantic web would allow search engines ingeneral, and artificial intelligence greater ability to deliver relevant content to the user..
And in an ideal world, I would agree..
But the folks over at Google actually get this one right.. Peter Novig (Director of search) says users tend to be incompetent.. A semantic web requires that web developers, bloggers, CEOs, etc., ‘get it’.. It requires that they include URI and RDF (Resource Description Framework) tags along with their normal XHTML and HTML markup.. And most people can’t even get basic HTML right, so how can we expect them to provide reliable RDF and URI data??
The people that will get it right, and get it right quickly will be the v1agra pushers, the heavy spammers, and of course the MFA (made for adsense) sites.. But this puts us right back where we are now with a broken search system that has little to do with what people are actually looking for and everything to do with web developers cashing in on the easy money to be made by being a whore for Google.. Not that that is a bad thing..
How do you make semantic web search viable?? Not with artificial intelligence.. At least not any time soon.. Armies of web browsers looking at site after site and determining which are eligible for inclusion in the index?? Maybe a better solution.. But there are a lot of sites out there and not enough people to search them.. I don’t really see a semantic web, LSI (latent semantic indexing), as anything that will be of any great use for quite some time.. It will simply put even more power in the hands of those willing to study and game the system at the expense of those that simply want to publish good information but lack the technical skills to compete..
~Fey