Web/Tech: November 2003 Archives
One of my passions is precision and clarity and so naturally I am drawn to:
Metadata, Taxonomies, And Vocabularies...link via[elearnspace blog]
In addition, here is a link to an excellent article on understanding the basics of ontology.
“$640K should be enough for anybody.”
--Bill Gates, 1981
I think we should outsource CEOs to India.
But what about services? When will IT services recover? I am still waiting!
"Strong third quarter PC sales have led Gartner Inc. to increase its fourth quarter PC shipment projections to 47.2 million units worldwide, it said Friday."
The web is an entirely bottoms up medium, evolving from the fringes. It would be nice if metadata could be standardized to conform to an ontology, but people do not think like this. The Semantic Web must concentrate on words and concepts. With a conceptual framework that recognizes incompatibilities and complexities organizing principles will emerge from the weak links.
A very worthwhile read: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview: "Much of the proposed value of the Semantic Web is coming, but it is not coming because of the Semantic Web. The amount of meta-data we generate is increasingly dramatically, and it is being exposed for consumption by machines as well as, or instead of, people. But it is being designed a bit at a time, out of self-interest and without regard for global ontology. It is also being adopted piecemeal, and it will bring with it with all the incompatibilities and complexities that implies. There are significant disadvantages to this process relative to the shining vision of the Semantic Web, but the big advantage of this bottom-up design and adoption is that it is actually working now."
There is a lot of innovation going on in this area and slowly developers are beginning to triangulate of the real needs of users. In my experience, the products are not as useful as they should be, but for a a developing product segment, they are pretty good. I am most impressed with the offerings from Contact Networks Corporation in Boston who seem to understand how to build networks within a defined community rather than addressing the needs of everyone on the web. Social networking products tend to overshoot the requirements of users and thus do not meet the rudimentary needs of users like me.
Best New Technologies: "The November edition of Business 2.0 (only available on-line to subscribers) has selected Social Networking Applications as the Technology of the Year."
