Revisiting Semantic Web's Pros and Cons - Page 3

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It's not surprising, however, that factoring that human element into meaningful Semantic Web data -- that is, Resource Description Framework, or RDF , a standard for describing machine-readable metadata -- may prove a major hurdle.

"Most of the important information we have is implicit and ambiguous and loose-edged and messy, and that stuff escapes the net of RDF," said author and technology commentator David Weinberger, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Some of that inherent looseness may be captured in narrow categories, or ontologies, but "there's a balance between the complexity of the ontology and its utility across ontology boundaries," said Weinberger, who most recently wrote about information classification in his 2007 book, Everything Is Miscellaneous.

"The more specific, detailed and complex you make your ontology, the more semantic value it has," Weinberger said. "But then, it will make it harder to integrate with other Semantic Web ontologies" because the syntaxes of different ontologies are not likely to be the same.

Both the problems of ending up with inane results and of dealing with the ambiguities of the real world cannot be solved by metadata, critics charge. Among them, writer and blogger Cory Doctorow, who blasted the concept in his 2001 essay "Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia."

In his essay, Doctorow described seven insurmountable obstacles to getting reliable metadata: People lie; people are lazy; people are stupid; people can't accurately observe themselves; schema aren't neutral; metrics influence results; and there's more than one way to describe something.

All true; but John Wilbanks, vice president for science at Creative Commons, a non-profit that develops alternative licenses for creative works than traditional copyright, sees no conflict between the two camps' take on the Semantic Web.

"There's got to be a little of both approaches," Wilbanks told InternetNews.com. "Clay Shirky is right that the problems facing the regular Web are not sufficient to justify going to the Semantic Web today; but industries like the pharmaceutical industry have a lot of problems and it's justified for them."

The Semantic Web is "just about making the Web work for databases by creating a context for links and, in many cases, creating the links," he added. "I call it the one database per child view."

[cob:In_Focus]That approach is "the opposite of the Web in many ways," he said. That's because it aims to find ways to take data sources in which structure is important -- like databases of genes and proteins -- then "find a way to wire that into the folksonomies of the fringes where the interesting science is happening, where the argument is not what the chemicals are but what they do."

With any luck, both sides of the Semantic Web debate may be mollified by such an approach. And just in time, too: the first applications are already being built on the emerging technology, Hendler said.

For example, several new products were announced at the Semantic Technology Conference, held in San Jose, Calif., last week.

Additionally, the Semantic Web camp received further votes of confidence in the form of an enhanced effort from business information powerhouse Thomson Reuters, which updated its Calais toolkit, designed to encourage broader deployment of Semantic Web technologies.

Despite such tentative steps, if the heated rhetoric from supporters and detractors indicates anything, it's that the Semantic Web has a good deal of debate still yet to come.