JUN 22nd 2007

The Semantic Web is a thing of data purity and interconnectedness the likes of which we have not seen. However, people are selfish. On top of that, people are lazy and fallible. All of these qualities in humans form a road block that we must get past if we hope to create the Semantic Web. We need to both satisfy the selfishness of man and overcome our error-prone nature if we are to reach our goal.

As Yihong said, it is impossible to beat the nature of selfishness, we have to follow it. The success of realizing the Semantic Web relies on whether we can persuade normal users into believing that they are contributing primarily to themselves. This is the key to sparking the ignition. Although it may be hopeless to try overriding human nature, there may be ways we can step around it.

The Semantic Web relies heavily on the availability of metadata. One way we can meet this requirement and step around the three human qualities I listed above is to design CMS software and other Web applications to create this information automatically. Integrating this feature into existing popular Web apps as well as creating plug-ins that accomplish the task of exporting metadata will create a thin membrane that the Semantic Web can be built from.

There needs to be an easy starting-point when trying to learn about the Semantic Web. It just isn't as easy or as obvious as learning XHTML and CSS. Those two are easy to master because of the small amount of learning required and the abundance of simple, straight-forward examples and example files. However the Semantic Web utilizes RDF/XML, SPARQL, OWL, ontologies, agents, interfaces, etc. The bar is set rather higher and we need to take this into consideration.

As a community we need to develop the tools, tutorials, and documentation that will help make it easier to learn the concepts of the Semantic Web.

About the author

James Simmons

It's my goal to help bring about the Semantic Web. I also like to explore related topics like natural language processing, information retrieval, and web evolution. I'm the primary author of Semantic Focus and I'm currently working on several Semantic Web projects.

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