Re: call to arms

Are we really mired?  I'm not sure I'd agree.

The semantic web and web of data succeed when they are invisible, as possibly 
suggested by "Connoly's bane":
[[
The bane of my existence is doing things that I know the computer could do for me.
]]
-- http://www.nature.com/nature/webmatters/xml/xml.html

What people notice, where we are mired, is in my view all those places where the 
Semantic Web has not yet reached.  Which, granted, is still most aspects of 
information handling.  But I also think a good deal of progress has been made. 
It's not always called "Semantic Web" or "Web of Data", but there are 
increasingly ways in which information can flow between applications.

So if we judge success by the new things that we can do, then I suspect this 
sense of mire will be with us for some time.  But if our touchstone is the old 
tedious things we no longer have to do, then a different perspective is offered. 
  Trouble is, work is a gas (*) and expands to fill available capacity ... I 
think an awful lot of the old things have to go away before "ordinary people" 
really start to notice.

So, yes, there's still a lot to do.  But I sense (as a pure intuition, with no 
defensible evidence to hand) that we are close to a cusp, where there is enough 
background tooling and infrastructure for the pace of change to start picking 
up.  But it may yet be a while before the effects of that change to become 
generally visible.

#g
--

(*) a riff on Nathan Mhyrvold's comments about software, as well as Parkinson's 
law -- http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/software-its-a-gas.html


Danny Ayers wrote:
> Right now, despite the promise, things seem mired in the mud. People
> aren't seeing the things that the Web of Data has proposed.
> 
> How do we get over this?
> 
> Face to face maybe - the bits the interwebs can't provide.
> 
> I suggest the leading lights of this sturm sit down in a room
> somewhere in northern Europe, and hammer the damn thing down. It is so
> stupid for it to take so long.
> 
> The Internet, and the Web is excellent at providing miraculous stuff,
> but the humans that tie the things together seem to be disappearing
> into different worlds.
> 
> The Semantic Web should be useful by now, by anyone's predictions.
> 
> something better change
> 
> (I'm a scaredy pacifist, so don't take that to heart)
>

Received on Tuesday, 30 March 2010 11:04:35 UTC