Nova Spivack: “The Semantic Web as an open and less evil web” The Semantic Web is just a better Data Web
We’re glad the director of Twine Nova Spivak thinks so and instead of conforming to the usual corporate routine of plugging his semantic application (product) Twine at a Spring trade conference, decided instead to address the importance of the Semantic Web as a less slanted, more relevant data architecture for the World Wide Web.
He asserts that we are currently entering the Web 3.0 decade where the connections between people and information have evolved into a greater compatibility. Machines and humans are about to embark on an adventure of intimate interaction never before attained. Of course, he’s talking about the Semantic Web but Web 3.0 is not simply a new number or bigger number than Web 2.0; it is instead, a paradigm upgrade to the infrastructure of the web with a new focus on the back end.
“In the fourth phase of the web we [now] have smarter interfaces that provide smarter user experience based on a richer data set”. That’s what marking up meta format data is designed for achieving.
“The general dream of the semantic web is to have all human knowledge in a machine-readable fashion. Why? Because machines do a better job with stupid things so we can use more of our time for intelligent things. Spivak asserts that “In order to do so we need to move the “intelligence out of applications, into the data” by framing the semantic web as an open database layer for the web. This also provides us with a better name for the semantic web: the data web“.”
Semantic search understands the meaning of items and the connections between them. Semantic search gets past the standard keyword search that has long gone past its sell-by date. The proponents of Soc Nets argue that machines will never be able to think like people do, but the Semantic evangelists make no such claim. While the inbuilt biases and credibility limits of Soc Net generated data has just been brazenly displayed with FaceBook announcing the commercial exploitation of their Soc Net database for product surveys.
The point is that machines have no purpose or function other than being for people and people are beginning to use machines to think better for them.
The semantic web is not so much about “semantics”, as it is set of open-source standards defined at W3C. The semantic web approach permits an open standard meta data in line with previous versions, that support the open data approach. The idea is that everyone profits from everyone’s metadata. The semantic web is a compromise in making the data smarter and the software smarter. It is the best of both worlds.
Spivack asserts that the semantic web as a higher resolution web because every piece of data contains more information. There are more links between data and the type of link is defined, giving more meaning to the link. It’s the we web is an intelligent database.
Wired maverick Kevin Kelly cites two kinds of emerging web intelligence :
One progressive ray of mass connectivity is what is commonly referred to as social media, Web 2.0 or what we call Soc Nets. The connectivity objective appears to be to connect everybody to everybody else in as many different arrangements as possible, so that information can be shared in so-called Real Time. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, the whole web universe of 10,000 Web 2.0 sites employs voluntary humans to exchange, collate, witness and process information. Within this data structure, we are the nodes. We generate the signals, but we also generate the noise.
The other apparently opposing (but not, in fact), progressive ray of connectivity is the product of an enriching hardware: an ever increasing number of machines, from mobile phones to computer transistors linking together in increasingly sophisticated levels of machine intimacy in order to get things done more practically and efficiently. This includes a growing number of server farms, data centers, and telecommunication networks. This ray leads inevitably to The One Machine consisting of all cell phones, PDAs, PCs, routers, wi-fi spots, satellite links,etc; and harbinger of every SF nightmare from Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream to the SkyNet Supercomputer that declares war on humankind in the Terminator films . But in practice, what happens is that varying platforms converge into greater compatibility so that we can use our machines more seamlessly. In this web universe, the signals at each node are generated by machines, although used and purposed by people.
The importance of arriving at the common ontologies and meta format data structures the Semantic web represents is that rather drawing a line between human and machine generated data, the collusion will be that both machines and humans are able to read the same data, thus making the web as a whole, a much more useful machine to use and place to be.
And One Machine spawned Terminator robots from the future aside, less corruptable and yes, less evil.
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