gate
valve

butterfly valve

check valve

globe valve

And that, at the end of the day, is what the currency of the web is about: eyeballs on screens; data that summons our attentions, both individually and collectively.

One could argue that Google’s entire business model is built on a foundation of the numbers of eyeballs on their data (your screen, your browser; their data).

The idea of reliability or ‘Truth’ introduces a philosophical tangent to the web in general and the semantic web specifically. If I may I be so bold as to throw my hat into the discussion, I would assert that it’s ‘relevance’ not ‘reliability’ that is the motor driving the semantic web.

Tim Berner-Lee strew the seeds of semantic development nearly six years ago as a call to answer a problem: that of organising the (even then), rapidly unfolding mass of data being published on the web into more useful and accessible data structures that would still maintain the strong democratic ethos that is the keystone of the www.

The answer to that call to action came from development teams from Stanford to Cambridge (as well as Manchester, Liverpool and Oxford) who through submissions through the w3c reached a loose consensus on standards for meta formats (Resource Description Frameworks); as well as a structure for ontologies (OWL) . What is referred to as the semantic web is not a killer application nor a replacement mark up language but a consensus on a approach to making the existing data on the web more searchable, more accessible, more ‘useful’ by being more relevant. ‘Relevant’ in terms of the inquiries, the questions that we pose.

Michelle’s point about Google placing Knol pages ahead of Squidoo pages on search results, as Knol is owned by Google is precisely what semantic development is poised to take on. Currently, Google controls the hierarchy of relevance for data on the web. Not because they are evil and power mad but because so may of us use them so often. And we use Google because Google is ‘useful’ and serves our interests.

It that sense there is no ‘thinking outside of bias’ because we are biased by the themes of our interests that determine what we pay attention to. We can be however, swayed by the data that at least appears to be more relevant to our interests and in that sense Semantic is more useful because it more finely discriminates the relevance of data published on the web.
The Semantic Web will only add an extra dimension of accessibility to the data that is already being published, it won’t be able to determine reliability, ‘Truth’ or political bias any more than Google does now.

But it should make our answers more relevant to our questions.

Practically speaking, within its circumscribed limits of influence the semantic web will allow insights to be gleaned and automatic actions to be performed on behalf of its human sponsors.

To depend on machines, the semantic web or the One or whatever, to infer truth will be a non-starter.

What the machine can do is to do a pattern analysis, coupled with the idea of semantic understanding, and arrive at an approximation of the right position, if it can be formulated as a proposition with surrounding facts. Like a spam filter weeding out crap, this ‘untruth’ filter would parse out assertions that disprove the initial proposition and associated facts.

That said, notions of ‘rightness’ are so convoluted and tangled within the self-interests of humans that any attempt to disembody it will be within the realm of impossibility.

Mahesh CRs last blog post..Links for 2008-12-06 [del.icio.us]

but as to raising character, creating wisdom, no, none of that will happen .. it will be the same banality and inanity and ignorance as before

The web, as with many other forms of media, is often driven and then in turn delivered, in response to mass demand.

Web 3.0 should improve the ability to find related information, but as with the current state of the web, further research and investigation should be taken before following a specific train of thought.

Again, going back to the mass demand statement, in turn the search algorithms will only further emphasis any false “rumour” due to the nature of us as humans and our interest in “popular rumour”.

So for those of us, that know how to pursue an information search and confirm the results Web 3.0 should be a very effective leap forward.

But for those following gossip, it will only lead to further gossip and hearsay, but then what do those people want if not more gossip? People buy tabloids because that’s the content/copy they want to read, the web is no different.

It is what we make of it, well not specifically “we” but you catch my drift. Corporation such as Google will always spin their take on a matter as much as a newspaper might hold more weight with specific B2B relationships and political allegiances on its editorial stance.

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In itself, in general it can’t. But what it can do is help people make such decisions. Right now it’s possible to use Semantic Web technologies to enable provenance tracking and allow statements regarding trust.

For example, the DIG blogs (http://dig.csail.mit.edu/) allow comments only from people the bloggers have asserted they know (through the bloggers FOAF files).

See also Tim Berners-Lee’s “Oh Yeah?” button suggestion from a few years ago: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/UI.html#OhYeah

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