Monday, May 26, 2008

Diderot and the Semantic Web

I've read an interesting post in this blog, about the Relevance of Information and the myths of a Semantic Web. I'm afraid it is not fully related to Data Access, nonetheless it is interesting. Please note it is in French.

The author made an extremely valuable effort to express himself about the expectations and limitations of the Semantic Web. He indeed has some good (and sometimesfunny) ideas, even if he has a poor knowledge of IA and thus derives some vague statements about it.

A few remarks about it:

  • The goal of the Semantic Web could not be limited to be a smart replacement of Google.

  • The ontologies do not provide a single version of the Thruth, and they can mimic human redundancies, overlaps, incompletion.

  • Dedicated semantic networks are not supposed to be easily connected to build a global brain.

  • Open source has just nothing to do with that.

  • Inference engines are only one facet of IA, IA is much more complex than that.

  • IA is not limited to problem resolution, neuronal networks, straight boolean logic.

  • Advanced IA will try to simulate and use human techniques (distributed IA...), and will deal with fuzzy logics (temporal logic, epistemic logic, know and believe logic, fear and love, try and see...).

  • This is not because IA and Semantic Web won't solve everything that they won't solve something.

  • Last but not least: the Semantic Web is not competing with human intelligence.


We can agree on:

  • A real Semantic Web is not for tomorrow morning.

  • There is a lot of hype in Web 2.0 (and everything which is "2.0" or "as a service").

    • I recently even saw Data 2.0.




Two articles related to it:

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