Clunky Flow

(or an effort to introduce a very interesting problem without mentioning the s**antic web)
The web as it exists today is dumb. Really dumb. And, I don’t mean in the way that much of the content is anti-intellectual or whatever. Duh! That’s like so not what I mean.  I mean like all the information and data is piled into a big incomprehensible heap with no ryhme or reason to its organisation. We uses tools like Google to search, but Google can end up belching up so many dumb unrelated results that we’ve no choice but to search through the search results trying to sort out the useful links from the dross.  And that’s like boring work that the machine should be doing, right?
via social network effect

Consider the following simple question: what are the homepages for all of the Web 2.0 companies located in San Francisco? With today’s tools, this is a nearly impossible question to answer. Typing “web 2.0 company san francisco� into Google returns a confusing mishmash of 12 million hits, most of which are neither companies nor located in San Francisco. It’s up to you, the human on the other side of the screen, to sift through the dross of ads, conference announcements, articles, and blog chatter to find the few gems you are looking for. It’s also up to you, the human, to cut/paste all of these into a spreadsheet for tracking.

This is a royal pain in the ass. I should know — I’ve tried to compile this list, and was quickly frustrated.

A smarter web would be one that would understand the information it has access to in the same way as a human would understand it.  A web that understands the meaning of the words on the pages in the way that a human understands that meaning.  A web with a common-sense understanding of its content would be so much more useful than the dumb web we have today.

It would also be a revolution.  A quantum leap in the information age.

At the moment, the web is like this massive, massive brain with access to masses and masses of information; but it remains incapable of combining that information in a meaninful way ie around concepts in the way the human brain does it.  Or to put it another way it is unable to think.  In non-academic language- It is dumb.   What is needed, is what academics call ‘the semantic web’– (I know. What a term! Exacting and off-putting in equal measure. Definitively academic ).  The semantic web would understand the information it holds and thus be able to intelligently combine that information around concepts.

So, that’s it, my take on the semantic web is that it is a simple idea with an off-putting title that represents a tough problem seeking a solution of revolutionary potential all wrapped into one.

With apologies (for my naive misrepresentations) and thanks ( for his insights) to Uldis Bojars for his intro to SIOC at BarCamp Dublin which helped me realise I’ve been working on key devs for the semantic web for the past 2 years.

1 Comment »