I am not sure I understand either. But we should be hesitant of jumping to too many conclusions, at least just yet. Tim is clearly an intellectual force capable of jumping over boundaries most of us cannot even see let alone jump over. We should ask Mr. Tim Berners Lee (TBL)to be more specific and to answer those basic questions..
For example I cannot really understand how his social networking tools would work--how is what described below different from a listserv or an affinity group that forms. I think that he wants to develop a system independent of the way we humans naturally like to communicate--mimicking in the online world what happens in the so called real world. If that is the case how can we trust that the machines and the artificial intelligence networks will not use highly personal information against us? Because one of the reasons we communicate in these patterns is precisely because we want to be cautious about information closest to us. Surely someone as brilliant as TBL can provide some more concrete answers and examples to help us ordinary folk out. Relevant Quote below "It’s also helping build powerful social networking tools -- friend-of-a-friend networks in which people write a little bit about themselves as metadata, and connections get formed based on this information. “Who knows what sort of Google will be built on top of this stuff,” Berners-Lee wondered. Computers will be able to browse the Web and find what we’re looking for based on what they know about our needs and the descriptive metadata they find on relevant websites. “A human being browse the Web? That will be a little old fashioned,” he joked. " Are we heading for a situation where the web browses human beings? Good idea for a science fiction story perhaps but we are not ready for that yet TBL I dont think.. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Larry Phillips Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2004 12:39 PM To: The Digital Divide Network discussion group Subject: Re: [DDN] Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving A Semantic Web I'm not sure if I understand the semantic web; but if I do, I don't think I want it. Technically, the sematic web requires meta data to be added to the url. In addition to complicating the url it presupposes knowing how others will view or use the data. Currently, meta tags embedded in the web page meet the need of identifying and typing content. Philosophically, rather than having content labeled with a standard identifier, I would prefer that search engines look for content that is relevant to the search terms. Assuming accurate labeling the best we could hope for is a situation similar to searches returning paid results. In other words, we will be dependent on the publisher to apply the standard identifiers in an accurate and comprehensive manner. Expecting publishers to look beyond their purposes is unreasonable and fanciful. What will a semantic web give us that we don't have now? Andy Carvin wrote: > Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving A Semantic Web > http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ > But from the very beginning of the Web, Berners-Lee had hoped that he > would be able to incorporate descriptive information into the Web’s > fundamental design, but for various reasons it didn’t make the cut. “One > thing I wanted to put in the original design was the ‘typing’ of links,” > he said. For example, let’s say you link your website to another site. > At the moment, the hyperlink connecting them contains very little > information: just an address to get to the other website’s content. But > Berners-Lee’s idea was to include “metadata” with each hyperlink to > describe *the relationship* between the two sites. For example: do the > people linking their two websites know each other personally, > professionally, or not at all? If they’re colleagues, how are they > working together, and in what fields? Where are they working? -- Larry Phillips FutureCraft http://www.ecn.ab.ca/~ljp Quantum 2000: Education for Today and Tomorrow http://www.ecn.ab.ca/quantum Alberta Consumers' Association http://www.ecn.ab.ca/consumer Conversations about education Ed Conversation mailing list http://www.topica.com/lists/edconversation/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message. _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
