It's About the Meta-Data

Our advisor Paul Ford, has replied to Clay Shirky’s critique of the Semantic Web with a truly excellent articleabout why the Semantic Web is indeed practical. I found Clay’s article to be very one-sided. Like Paul, I agree with Clay that the futuristic goals of some Semantic Web researchers in academia are well…futuristic. Here at Radar Networks we don’t have such lofty goals — we are not trying to transform the Web into a gigantic automated syllogism solver. Indeed, resolving logical expressions from shards of RDF scattered across millions of Web pages is a nearly intractable problem today and we would not attempt that. Instead, our interest is in making it easier for individuals and applications to share reusable chunks of metadata. I don’t believe that individuals will (or even should) write RDF by hand and just stick it on their pages. I believe we need to provide tools that will help them express their ideas in a natural, human-centric way, without burdening them with the underlying RDF, RDFS, OWL, and the tasks of knowledge engineering. Our software provides that layer of user-friendliness that is missing from current Semantic Web efforts.