Re: "State of the Semantic Web" - personal opinions?

Dear Tim and all,

Semantic Web is a great vision. But there is a question---what is Semantic
Web really about? I agree to the argument that linked data is too narrow to
describe the entire vision of Semantic Web.

Furthermore, I observed that many people (even here at W3C forum) only
simply connect Semantic Web to data. Where are humans? Isn't the web itself
all about humans in contrast to data? I think it is a big misleading of the
issue.

In a recent post<http://yihongs-research.blogspot.com/2008/06/we-are-in-new-transition-part-2.html>,
I compared TimBL's invention of WWW to James Watt's invention of steam
engine. In fact, TBL is the new age James Watt. The evolution of World Wide
Web is changing our human society in a way that steam engine once did to our
society. The vision of Semantic Web is to produce a new form of "mind asset"
that humans can consume, sell, share, transfer. It is much greater than
machine-processable data.

On the other hand, if we think of the academic verson of Semantic Web with
OWL and RDF philosophically, it is indeed a network of new "mind asset" in
contrast to annotated data with ontologies.

If we may deliver such an idea of "mind asset" to the public, it would be
sticky and it can significantly leverage the prevalence of Semantic Web.

Yihong



On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 7:03 AM, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org> wrote:

>
> I think it is important not to asses the semantic web as though it were
> another software technology like OOP.  People who miscategorize it in that
> way look for the wrong form of return on investment.  It is important to
> look as it as an interconnection  bus, and it hasn't started working in
> earnest until one person's data is being used by some other unplanned use.
> This unexpected reuse is the meaure.
>
> So I would be interest in you analysis of the way in which people have
> re-used things like the Linked Open Data out there.    Mashups which have
> been build on it and so on.  Application-specific things and non-specific.
>
> Tim
>
>
>


-- 
===================================
Yihong Ding
Department of Computer Science
Brigham Young University
Web 1.0 residence (Homepage): http://www.deg.byu.edu/ding/
Web 2.0 residence (Thinking Space): http://yihongs-research.blogspot.com/