Update: Added a quote from Tim Bray that I had forgotten.
I just came across a paper called The Self-Organized Web: The Yin to the Semantic Web’s Yang . Though it was written awhile ago (at least, I assume so, since it was apparently written before Yahoo bought Overture).
They start off by saying:
The Web programmer’s task— …—is to use these patterns [self-organized structure] to make the Web more digestible to users. This goal complements the Semantic Web’s goal: to have humans help make the Web more digestible for computers. Exploiting the self-organized Web will improve tomorrow’s algorithms; manually adding computer-friendly annotations to the Semantic Web will help today’s less-sophisticated algorithms to cope.
The key here is that our goal is to find ways that allow people to create meaninful content which is consumable by computers. I think SW folk have failed by not focusing on this factor enough. Conventional wisdom seems to be that people won’t have to read the source, they’ll just be able to use tools to generate it for them. I believe this premise to be false. TBL and company though that no one would really have to read and understand HTML, we’d all just have tools to create it for us. I think experience has shown this expectation to be unfounded– it is quite common for ‘civilians’ (non-geeks) to read and write HTML and most learn it by example, by reading others’ HTML. I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that the future will be any different.*
Update: I just refound an old post by Tim Bray which hits the same point:
RDF has ignored what I consider to be the central lesson of the World Wide Web, the “View Source” lesson. The way the Web grew was, somebody pointed their browser at a URI, were impressed by what they saw, wondered “How’d they do that?”, hit View Source, and figured it out by trial and error.
[/Update]
Back to the paper– they finish with…
But for the foreseeable future, efforts to leverage the self- organized Web will complement efforts to build the Semantic Web. Both open up opportunities for innovative new algorithms—data mining on one hand, symbolic inference on the other. Where these efforts meet, tools will arise for vastly improved search, filtering, personalization, economic efficiency, and scientific understanding of the social forces and trends reflected in the Web. We believe that the Web’s properties—structure, content, and explicit or inferred metadata—will continue to evolve in a decentralized and self-organized way. Users will benefit most if work on creating the Semantic Web coevolves with work on tools for data-driven analysis of the self-organized Web.
I whole-heartedly believe that the only way to succesfully create a more meaningful world-wide web is to build it in and on the current world-wide web.
In an sense the WWW and Semantic Web must meet in the middle. People writting for the www should try their best to make their material more meaningful, which will allow both people and computers to make more use of it.
Viva la revolution!
* Of course, this could be a result of the lack of quality authoring tools for (good) HTML.
