Re: bootstrapping decentralized sparql

On 17/5/09 10:06, Giovanni Tummarello wrote:
> Hi Peter,
>
> we all like to think "p2p", distributed, etc.
> but the fact is that we love it too much, disregarding the basic
> economic reasons that underly how the world (in fairness) works.
>
> But lets put a constraint.
>
> Lets imagine that we dont live forever and tha tthe time one should
> work on a topic should be limited (e.g. 10years is a good span so i
> began in 2002, 3 years left) dont you want to see some actual
> advantange delivered to the end user within this timeframe? I do and
> very strongly.
>
> Google and Sindice are NOT closed infrastructures. They work on  open
> standards and anyone can implement something like this given the
> proper economics and engineering.
>
> Google falls tomorrow, we all use Yahoo Search (which works very well
> IMO) or MSN .. etc.anything that's useful on the web will have an
> economic value which will keep it alive.
>
> Think of this same discussion like 15 years ago. Immagine that as
> Search engines emerge, people would be discussing about "instead using
> automatic methods for trackback links across websites becouse this
> search engine thing wont really go nowhere"
> how realistic and useful would these discussion have been in
> hindsight? would these discussion have been the best thing to do to
> bring the web "to its full potential"?
>
> this is NOT to say however that the model is clear! Semantic Search
> engines (that is an engine which really helps the semantic web) are
> all but something that we know exactly how to do or how it should
> behave. Lots of work to do really.
>
> Anyway :-)
>
> On my side i can just say that we are committed (e.g. i have base
> http://sfi.ie funding for the next 4 years for example) to making life
> simpler, spare a lot of hard work to many on the Semantic Web
> therefore acting as a catalyst to, hopefully, very exciting apps to
> come.

May I ask what you said you'd do in those 4 years, re Sindice? Is the 
plan to build it out as a business so that it becomes self-supporting, 
or saleable so that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc buy it up? Or that 
it'll be in a stable-enough state after 4 years that the core works 
relatively cheaply and new fun things can be added by more research funding?

Dan

Received on Sunday, 17 May 2009 08:41:54 UTC