Re: The O'Reilly Filter?

HI Eric and Eric --

Actually, the O'reilly folks do say what they mean by "Web 2.0", by 
specifying seven attributes thereof [1].

Their attributes fall somewhat short of (my understanding of) the agenda 
for the Semantic Web -- as described for instance in the upper part of 
the layer cake diagram.

One way of indicating that the future SW extends Web 2.0 might be to 
point to the Rules+Logic+Proof+Trust requirements outlined in the layer 
cake. One way of meeting some of those requirements is described in [2,3].

Hope this helps. -- Adrian Walker


[1] 
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=5

[2] http://www.semantic-conference.com/program/sessions/S2.html

[3] 
http://www.reengineeringllc.com/A_Wiki_for_Business_Rules_in_Open_Vocabulary_Executable_English.pdf

-- 

Internet Business Logic (R)
Executable open vocabulary English
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Reengineering,  PO Box 1412,  Bristol,  CT 06011-1412,  USA

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Eric Neumann wrote:

>
>
> Here's a brain-teaser I am putting out to the community...
>
> As part of a story I am writing on the social web in science, I was 
> reviewing a few sites including Connotea.org where I discovered an 
> interesting disparity:
>
> On its main page, it has a Popular Tags list "of what Connotea's users 
> are currently reading about", with fonts sizes relative to the 
> popularity of the tag usage. Yet when queried, one of it's most 
> popular tags is "Semantic Web", which doesn't even appear on the list, 
> though Web 2.0 is listed twice. Curious...
>
> Here is a partial tabulation of listed items and the numbers of 
> documents referencing them:
>
> AIDS - 551
> Bioinformatics - 781
> Biomarker - 68
> Chemistry - 667
> Malaria - 350
> Medicine - 418
> Ruby - 95
> Web 2.0 - 237
>
> Semantic Web (not on the list) has 396 references in the main area, 
> and 191 within group/semweb-lifesci, placing it between Malaria and 
> Medicine in popularity (509 documents within Connotea have some 
> mention of Semantic Web). Even RDF has a 236 references as well!
>
> Hmmm... I was wondering if some new kind of social filter or metric is 
> being applied here, or perhaps the list is hand-built and not 
> generated by stats.
>
> But the mention of Web 2.0 in the list does lead one to wonder: Is Web 
> 2.0 afraid of the Semantic Web? In a community that values unbiased 
> inclusion of facts derived from scientific research, this use of 
> social tagging appears to be a bit unscientific and misleading, which 
> surprises me more coming from the august Nature Publishing Group.
>
> This is all comes on the heels of last months BioIT-World Conference 
> (aka Life Science Expo) where I was puzzled that Tim O'Reilly chose 
> not to make any mention of Semantic Web advancements or activities, 
> even though he referred to tagging of scientific data. In reply to a 
> question from a pharmaceutical representative as to what the 
> difference was between Semantic Web and Web 2.0, he glibly said 
> "Semantic Web is an inefficient top-down process, while Web 2.0 is a 
> more socially driven bottom-up approach". I assumed he was referring 
> to the building of ontologies, so I had to correct him that defining 
> data around RDF does not require top-down approval processes, and is 
> quite comparable to the use of tags. Me thinks there is more to this 
> spin story....
>
> In any case, this is proving to be interesting, so I'm keep an eye on 
> this and will try to find out what the real reasons are...
>
> Eric
>
>
>

Received on Sunday, 30 April 2006 18:25:25 UTC