The Evolving Web

Semantic Web. Web 3.0. The Intelligent Web. Whichever terminology you want to use, it's a vision for the Web in which information is given explicit meaning, making it easier for machines to automatically process and integrate said information.

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I have been giving the semantic web a lot of thought. Ever since I added the Y!Q to my owensperformance blog site I have wondered if this technology could really do anything cool. The Y!Q is fairly cool, but it is the service behind it that is cooler. Still, the Y!Q service is pretty dumb, in fact currently all semantic services are pretty dumb. The hard part is to try to make them smarter without creating a bunch of work for the users. For example, tag clouds are cool, but having to enter a bunch of tags is too hard. Similarly, tagging a URL and providing a description and tags for each thing I find is too much work. I would want a service that does that for me, and also digests the resulting service.

The problem is that for this to work, the service has to know who I am, and know an awful lot about me. I don't really want anything to have that level of understanding of me, or do I. I guess that is our dilemma.