Nova

I totally agree with you that “Nobody thinks that everyone is just going to magically agree on a few ontologies or even a few data formats” and I think I pretty much said so in my article. But the fact is that there are people who think that that’s the intention and they, therefore, think the Semantic Web is impossible.

I set out to present those people with another view of the semantic web, in hopes that it would clarify some things and dispell some myths. Instead, I seem to have sparked some controversy among people who, as far as I can tell, already share my perspective.

I’ve left a more comprehensive response to your post over on your blog, but here let me just say that I did not mean to mischaracterize your article. I am responding more to the preconceived notions of people that I have actually spoken to about their understanding of the Semantic Web. Now, perhaps some of those people read the article and didn’t get much further than the tale of Pete and Lucy, or perhaps they didn’t read it at all.

I’m not saying that the ideas in the article are anything short of brilliant – I’m saying there’s still a need to bring these ideas into terms that the mainstream can relate to. Unfortunately, the part of the article that attempts to do this overreaches a little (in my opinion) and as a result, has caused some of the misguided notions that you, yourself, are so rightfully concerned about.

Based on your reaction – and James Hendler’s, the force of which sort of surprised me – I fear that I didn’t give the proper context to this post. I didn’t mean to say that Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, & and Ora Lassila have this rigid view of what the Semantic Web should be. Their body of work clearly shows that they don’t – for anyone who has read it.

What I meant is that the Scientific American article starts out by painting a picture that oversimplifies the concept, and many people never get beyond that. I’ve noticed this over and over in my own conversations with people, and I’m trying to find a way to get beyond those preconceptions. In my experience, most of the people who dismiss the concept of the Semantic Web do so on the grounds that they think the intention is that it be The Intelligent Web.

By nature, I break things down and define them. If I have to split the Semantic Web into two parts, two phases, or two models in order to explain it better to people, then that’s what I’m going to do. Just because I’m trying to aknowledge and respond to these misguided notions, doesn’t mean I fall into the camps that believe them.

The “Orderly Semantic Web” is a straw man. Nobody thinks that everyone is just going to magically agree on a few ontologies or even a few data formats; it’s going to be a “fractal mess” (to quote Tim Berners-Lee) for a long time to come.

I don’t know where the idea that the SemWeb is about the straw man comes from, but it seems to have taken a better hold on people than the truth.