RE: SVG Mania and the Sematic Web

>I'm just wondering about the consequences for the Sematic Web?  There
>shouldn't be any, as far as I can see, only peoples abuse of the media by
>not supplying real metadata.  And the questions with metadata, given the
>report at http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/02/10-meta.html most people
>do not bother with it, not because they don't necessarily care, but time is
>money, and to invest time doing something there has to be a return on
>investment, and there is little evidence to show any ROI on it now.  But I
>do feel that using Dublin Core as a CMS data repository and search
>repository is a different matter and offers real value.
>
>What do others think about these issues.

One of the persistent arguments against the viability of the Semantic Web in
general is that people can't or simply won't bother putting metadata in (or
with) their documents. I recently gave vent to my opinion on this on xml-dev
[1]:

The "metacrap" argument is a complete red herring, because it makes the
assumption that the creation of metadata must involve extra effort on the
part of the system/application users. In most circumstances there is stacks
of metadata on hand, and I don't have far to look for an example. Nearby
there's all the mail header date/time & routing material etc, there's a
thread in the archives. Without any extra effort on my part, there's a sig
with the addresses of my web space and some of the material I'm working on.
Linked to that there is biographical information about me. Your address is
here too, which may or may not be used to get to biographical information
about yourself, but it does describe a communication channel to you through
which more information could be obtained.
Ok, so the mail client I'm using doesn't take advantage of all this, and
that to recall any of this pile of information post-mortem scraping is
needed. This client (Outlook) is smart enough that if I didn't have defenses
then a bit of kiddy code from a third party could make it spam everyone in
my address book. Why shouldn't the client use this information in a
consistent, secure and useful fashion? C'mon mail dude, the spell checker
knows this is in UK English, why don't you?

Cheers,
Danny.

-----------
Danny Ayers

Semantic Web Log :
http://www.citnames.com/blog

"The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne." - Chaucer


[1] http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200211/msg00707.html

Received on Monday, 2 December 2002 11:18:55 UTC