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.