Gary Potter posted about an article in MIT’s Magazine of Innovation, Technology Review, in which Mark Frauenfelder of boingboing interviews creator of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee:
On why people aren’t excited about the Semantic Web…
It’s not the first time I’ve had this paradigm-shift problem.
On getting past it…
…we are just starting by putting applications onto the Semantic Web one by one and linking them up…. what’s exciting is the network effect.
On how the Semantic Web understands data…
Suppose you’re browsing the Web and you find a seminar advertised, and you decide to go. Now, there is all sorts of information on that page, which is accessible to you as a human being, but your computer doesn’t know what it means. So you must open a new calendar entry…..Then get your address book and add new entries for the people involved in the seminar.
If there were a Semantic Web version of the page, it would have labeled information on it that would tell the computer “this is an event” and what time and date it is.
If you want to be part of the Semantic Web, you’ll need a friend-of-a-friend file. A FOAF file is a formatted rendition of your personal data – first name, last name, email address, etc. To create the file, you need to fill out a form and an automated process creates the file. Links on how it works and how to implement it on your page are also there.
Slowly we evolve toward a more understanding, more understandable web…