Did you know there is an alarming shortage of logicians and ontologists around the world? Apparently everywhere, in all countries.
Came as a complete shock/surprise to me.
I was reading ‘Digital Universe’ to Add 1.8 Zettabytes in 2011 by Rich Miller which says:
More than 1.8 zettabytes of information will be created and stored in 2011, according to the latest IDC Digital Universe Study sponsored by EMC. That’s a mind-boggling figure, equivalent to 1.8 trillion gigabytes -enough information to fill 57.5 billion 32GB Apple iPads. It also illustrates the challenge in storing and managing all that data.
But then I remembered the “state of the Semantic Web” report of 31,634,213,770 triples.
I know it is apples and oranges to some degree but compare the figures for data and linked data:
| Data | 1,800,000,000,000,000,000,000 |
| Triples | 31,634,213,770 |
Not to mention that the semantics of data is constantly evolving. If not business and scientific data, recall that “texting” was unknown little more than a decade ago.
It is clear that we don’t have enough logicians and ontologists (who have yet to agree on a common upper ontology) to keep up with the increasing flow of data. For that matter, the truth is they have been constantly falling behind for centuries. Systems are proposed, cover some data, only to become data that has to be covered by subsequent systems.
Some options to deal with this crisis:
- Universal Logician/Ontologist Conscription Act – All 18 year olds world wide have to spend 6 years in the LogoOnto Corps. First four years learning the local flavor of linked data and the last two years coding data.
- Excess data to /dev/null – Pipe all non-Linked data to /dev/null until logicians/ontologists can catch up. Projected to be sometime after 5500, perhaps late 5500’s. (According to Zager and Evans.)
- ???
There are other options. Propose yours and/or wait for some suggestions here next week!
[…] Last week I mentioned that we are facing a critical shortage of both logicians and ontologists: Alarum – World Wide Shortage of Logicians and Ontologists. […]
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