Semantic Web, Anyone?

What's New Here?

They promised us flying cars!

Futurists have consistently used clouded crystal balls. We don't need a heliport on every roof since we mostly telecommute. We need roadmaps for our devices to use.

Ambient as air!

The "Semantic" Web can enable us much better than its uncle "World Wide" Web. As Tim Berners-Lee said, repurposing of what we mean makes our atmosphere of information usable by us all - including our slave-machines. The Semantic Web is a mechanism for providing accessibility to the Web for our "slaves" as well as to us, their owners.

Where, when, am I?

The burning eternal question is for us to contemplate/consider/communicate/+. We need to deal with art/play/ - creation/\recreation: our machines couldn't care less.

Now what/how?

To repurpose our sea of content for machine accessibility requires that the information we are to become awash in be pidginized so that computers can manipulate it for us. The "keepers of the Web" are feverishly immersed in a quagmire of acronyms to help do this. Think RDF|CC/PP|N3|+ and be glad that you needn't bother your pretty little head therewith!

Sound familiar?

In about six months...

As in "natural speech voice recognition" which check has been in the mail for half a century! This time Lucy will not pull back the about-to-be-kicked football and we will score - trust me on this!

Universal/User-friendly/Utile

Sort of like mnemonic/intuitive? Past frustrations imposed by vapo(u)rware will be minimalized by the self-healing properties of a Web. By making sure that Helen Keller could have used it and Steven Hawking could write to it, we will all be the richer.

Bring order out of chaos

Yeah, right! Although our traditional role as time-binding, negative-entropy enclaves will be enhanced, we still must sing in choirs and dance/play/compete/triumph/exult/+ - too bad!

William's latest update: 14 February, 2001.