Ftrain, by Paul Ford

Mark has some thought-out criticism of the Semantic Web: “Look, semantics is hard. Forget the social problems of implementation and the technical problems of the current generation of syntax. Semantics all by itself is just fundamentally hard....In many respects, I believe we’re now following in the footsteps of 18th and 19th-century philosophers. I see otherwise intelligent people falling into the same traps that intelligent people fell into 100 years ago.” I disagree - more later, you know - but Mark of all the critics of the SemWeb seems to have his head well-wrapped around the issues involved. I think there are real benefits to be gained from a fairly large framework that uses existing knowledge rep concepts and extends them to the web, and I think issues of trust and other metrics can be managed collectively at least as well as, say, eBay manages them now. And the emphasis is on collectively. But, ferchrissakes, more later. & the SemWeb is lucky to receive thoughtful criticism, but I also think the Doctorow piece linked in Mark’s essay, though, is really more pop-info trashing of the metadata concept than thoughtful crit.