The World Wide Web turned 20 years old last Friday, and its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, says its potential is hardly reached. His next vision, a vision he’s been talking about for years, is the Semantic Web, which on the surface seems as simple as herding cats. But don’t let the specifics bog down a perfectly good concept with just the right amount of vagueness to drive it forward.
This Berners-Lee called me to the carpet a couple of years ago because I didn’t quite get it, either. That’s why he’s at MIT and I’m not.
Tim Berners-Lee
The Reuters writers focused instead on things more tangible to their readers, such as his warnings about government and corporate snooping on Web users by creating individual profiles based on the data users supply. But this was my favorite part:
When Berners-Lee wrote his proposal in March 1989, his boss at CERN, the world's biggest particle physics laboratory, scrawled "vague, but exciting" on the memo.
I found that interesting in light of a couple of things. Recently, futurist and cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling gave
Thomas D. Wason
Defining the Semantic Web is difficult. You can run the Thomas D. Wason, PhD
Berners-Lee told me I had it backwards in 2007, basing my understanding on a common misconception that led a Semantic Web developer from Berkeley to declare it dead on arrival. The Semantic Web, said Berners-Lee, wasn’t so much about getting humans to adhere to a common language (fat chance!) when identifying data so that machines could better understand it, but more about getting machines to understand data in more human ways (um, I think), and then integrating that data in a way that is intuitively accessible and contextual.
Here’s how he defined it himself:
"The semantic web is about data integration. Most of the data is in existing databases. Much of it is currently exported in HTML and can be easily exported also in RDF using a tool like D2R Server. Data comes from many sources. Calendars. Scientific measurements. Applications such as calendars, financial programs, and so on.
"Yes, it is possible to write data into online media, but that (a) is very effort-intensive and (b) only covers a fraction of all the things data is about. I'm not holding my breath for that."
And that means? I don’t know, but my guess is we’ll know it when we see it, and so long as enough vagueness remains innovation could be limitless. All I really know is that if something the creator of the World Wide Web is doing sounds “vague, but exciting,” we should pay attention.
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