Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

March 13, 2012

Keep the web weird

Filed under: Semantic Web,Semantics — Patrick Durusau @ 8:14 pm

Keep the web weird

Pete Warden writes:

I’m doing a short talk at SXSW tomorrow, as part of a panel on Creating the Internet of Entities. Preparing is tough because don’t I believe it’s possible, and even if it was I wouldn’t like it. Opposing better semantic tagging feels like hating on Girl Scout cookies, but I’ve realized that I like an internet full of messy, redundant, ambiguous data.

The stated goal of an Internet of Entities is a web where “real-world people, places, and things can be referenced unambiguously“. We already have that. Most pages give enough context and attributes for a person to figure out which real world entity it’s talking about. What the definition is trying to get at is a reference that a machine can understand.

The implicit goal of this and similar initiatives like Stephen Wolfram’s .data proposal is to make a web that’s more computable. Right now, the pages that make up the web are a soup of human-readable text, a long way from the structured numbers and canonical identifiers that programs need to calculate with. I often feel frustrated as I try to divine answers from chaotic, unstructured text, but I’ve also learned to appreciate the advantages of the current state of things.

Now there is a position that merits cheerful support!

You need to read what comes in between but Pete concludes:

The web is literature; sprawling, ambiguous, contradictory, and weird. Let’s preserve those as virtues, and write better code to cope with the resulting mess.

I remember Bible society staffers who were concerned that if non-professionals could publish their own annotations attached to the biblical text, that the text might suffer as a result. I tried to assume them that despite years, centuries, if not longer, of massed lay and professional effort, the biblical text has resisted all attempts to tame it. I see no reason to think that will change now or in the future.

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

Powered by WordPress