The danger of believing in silver bullets
Nick Wakeman writes in the Washington Technology Business Beat:
Whether it is losing weight, getting rich or managing government IT, it seems we can’t resist the lure of a silver bullet. The magic pill. The easy answer.
Ten or 12 years ago, I remember a lot of talk about leasing and reverse auctions, and how they were going to transform everything.
Since then, outsourcing and insourcing have risen and fallen from favor. Performance-based contracting was going to be the solution to everything. And what about the huge systems integration projects like Deepwater?
They start with a bang and end with a whimper, or in some cases, a moan and a whine. And of course, along the way, millions and even billions of dollars get wasted.
I think we are in the midst of another silver bullet phenomenon with all the talk around cloud computing and everything as a service.
I wish I could say that topic maps are a semantic silver bullet. Or better yet, a semantic hand grenade. One that blows other semantic approaches away.
Truthfully, topic maps are neither one.
Topic maps rely upon users, assisted by various technologies, to declare and identify subjects they want to talk about and, just as importantly, relationships between those subjects. Not to mention where information about those subjects can be found.
If you need evidence of the difficulty of those tasks, consider the near idiotic results you get from search engines. Considering the task they do pretty good but pretty good still takes time and effort to sort out every time you search.
Topic maps aren’t easy, no silver bullet, but you can capture subjects of interest to you, define their relationships to other subjects and specify where more information can be found.
Once captured, that information can be shared, used and/or merged with information gathered by others.
Bottom line is that better semantic results, for sharing, for discovery, for navigation, all require hard work.
Are you ready?