RE: Re: How will the semantic web emerge

Dear all:
I agree with Shashi and Sandro but would like to add a comment.

First of all, I think there are two types of content that can be annotated:

a) Content from communities in which there is a proper incentive to annotate
your data correctly in the sense that the authors want to contribute to not
only a high recall BUT ALSO A HIGH PRECISION. I think that e.g. academic
research is such a field - you do not want your papers to appear on top of
Google for any query. "Annotation Spamming" does not make too much sense in
such areas.

There is significant overlap with what Shashi calls "the most information
hungry of people", but the explanation is different.

b) Content for which there is some incentive for incorrect annotation (e.g.
including keywords that are far-fetched or even obviously incorrect). This
is an area in which without additional mechanisms, "Annotation Spamming"
will likely make annotations without additional mechanisms useless, since
malicious content providers will with intention add incorrect annotations to
their content.

Folksonomies and lightweight approaches for type a) content can basically
lift off immediately - we only need search engines that make use of this,
which will appear as soon as there is enough such content to become famous
or rich with such an engine (I believe in Adam Smith that the improvement of
one's own fate is an inevitable incentive for the provision of goods or
services ;-)).

But as soon as we go to business scenarios or other type b) content, we need
ranking algorithms or other type of functionality that helps us filter out
the noise and bias created by economic incentives for providing false or
far-fetched annotation; and, to my knowledge, such is not yet available in a
mature form.

Just my two cents :-)

Martin

---------------------------
martin.hepp@deri.org, phone: +43 512 507 6465
http://www.heppnetz.de / http://www.deri.org

-----Original Message-----
From: semantic-web-request@w3.org [mailto:semantic-web-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Shashi (MIT)
Sent: Dienstag, 13. Dezember 2005 18:42
To: Asankhaya Sharma
Cc: semantic-web@w3.org
Subject: Re: Re: How will the semantic web emerge


I am with Sandro on this one. The Semantic Web is likely to be orthogonal to
the current www - in the sense that it will complement the human web. My
guess is HTML and current web-base scripting languages ( a al Qwerty
keyboards) are so well established that getting them to change to include
Ontological data seems unlikely. 
Ontologies and RDF etc will run in the background as 'enhancements' by
people exporting their databases, possibly via semantic webservices and what
have you. So mixing in with HTML seems less and less a possibility

I have also one more thought on this, that the initial wave of the Semantic
Web will be used by the most information hungry of people e.g. researchers,
scientists, business analysts etc - they will be the "lead users". Your
average Mom and pop store Website may little use for Semantics for a good
time to come.

Received on Wednesday, 14 December 2005 14:41:09 UTC