Economist on the Semantic Web
By Tim Finin on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 10:49 pm.The Economist has a short article on the Semantic Web, Start making sense that is positive and upbeat.
“Big and small companies are getting into the business of building an intelligent web of linked data
Some new ideas take wing spontaneously. Others struggle to be born. The “semantic web” is definitely in the latter category. But it may have found its midwife in Reuters, a business-information company.
The semantic web (or “web 3.0”, as some people are trying to re-brand it), is the name given to the idea that the pages of the world wide web ought to carry more than just the meaning they are intended to convey to the human reader. They should also, the thinking goes, be tagged and flagged in ways that machines can make semantic sense of, as people make semantic sense of language. That way, machines could make instant connections that would take serious amounts of time for people to see, or might even elude them altogether.”
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The article touches on RDF and OWL and a number of companies building on the technology, including Reuters Calais, Twine and Qitera. The last one was new to me.
Related posts: • Economist on the digital home; • Is Google too googley for it’s own good?; • links for 2007-04-18;
UMBC eBiquity Blog
April 11th, 2008 at 11:04 am
I had a general question. I already know their would be security issues involved to some extent and also a stigma of possible lags, but regardless I was wondering what others thought about this idea I had. A large part of a computers or laptops size is due to the harddrive. Why don’t they do some research into a unified database via the web or wireless depending on locations. Where instead of just buying the internet, you buy storage space depending on how much you use. Almost like leasing a storage unit to put your belongings in per month, etc. In that way it would eliminate the need for harddrives.
The possible downfalls I know of already are:
1. Lag time from point A to B etc.
2. Security issues.