- From: Paul Tyson <phtyson@sbcglobal.net>
- Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:11:58 -0500
- To: "semantic-web@w3.org" <semantic-web@w3.org>
What a beautiful invitation, Danny! From my sliver view inside a typical American corporation, semantic web has a long road ahead. No business man will pay $1.00 for a system that will tell him that his mother's sister is his aunt, which is about all that SemWeb101 shows you. But show him an application that will tell him if his billion-dollar aircraft design meets all requirements, and you'll be in for some money. As with all standards that enable information owners to control their information, the semantic web profit model is elusive. When tools for knowledge representation and exchange again become commodities (as they were for most of the Gutenberg age), the market will encourage people to compete on their ability to think and provide value, instead of just charging license fees for locking up your enterprise data. On the other hand, since semantic web content is, ultimately, the distilled product of thinking, maybe license fees won't go away, because it is often easier to pay than to think. The semantic web is what we have all been groping for since the first computer program was written. We didn't want text processors; we wanted thought recording and retrieval tools. We didn't want computer-aided drafting programs; we wanted to create models from our imagination. But we are still in the firm grip of paradigms meant to encode letters and lines in computer memory. These paradigms are huge sea anchors holding back progress of the semantic web; and they are made more powerful by the business investment (and inertia) in applications that embody those paradigms. Semantic web is a tough sell. The business man, nor the common man in the street, really doesn't care how the application is built, as long as it meets his needs. Returns on semantic web investments will be slow and diffuse. The semantic web is like the proverbial elephant--a lot of different things, not the same to everyone. Part of it is patched on to the old web to provide additional functionality; part of it is webified AI; part of it is just common sense (universal identifiers for resources? what a concept!); part of it is greenfield technology. So what are you selling, and to whom? Good luck with your article. I look forward to reading it. --Paul Danny Ayers wrote: > In brief, some time soon I'm planning to do a moderately comprehensive, > fairly non-technical write-up on this topic ...
Received on Tuesday, 1 July 2008 03:11:47 UTC