Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Wikipedia 3.0 and the semantic web

Interesting article on Web 3.0 aka the "semantic web".

The problem with the Semantic Web, besides that researchers are still debating which design and implementation of the ontology language model (and associated technologies) is the best and most usable, is that it would take thousands or tens of thousands of knowledgeable people many years to boil down human knowledge to domain specific ontologies.

However, if we were at some point to take the Wikipedia community and give them the right tools and standards to work with (whether existing or to be developed in the future), which would make it possible for reasonably skilled individuals to help reduce human knowledge to domain-specific ontologies, then that time can be shortened to just a few years, and possibly to as little as two years.


In a way, and certainly not surprising to anyone who was involved, iNetNow was an attempt at the semantic web and had the company and/or service lived on, I imagine the surfboard might have adopted a sort of wiki philosophy to the design, usability and content.

4 comments:

Jake of All Trades said...

I almost posted this same article yesterday, but got distracted and hadn't gotten around to it.

100% agree. I often daydream about what the Surfboard would be like today. I see a mixture of Wiki and client specific RSS for the surfboard, Zuma based SMS alerts when new data is found on old or frequent queries, iNet powering 511 for half the country and 411 for every MVNO, more internal databases ala the KnowledgeBase and SiteSearch, and a blog based intranet replacing the Friday update and solving internal communication problems once and for all.

derteufel said...

Of course, Bo is shaking his head at Neil and Jacob right now. "Yeah, and who was going to CODE that?" ;o)

BoRyan said...

If only I knew then what I know now.

Jake of All Trades said...

Loving this thread. What does BoRyan know now? Do tell...