"What’s the endgame for the Semantic Web? I’d propose that it is a web where any information you input is immediately cleaned up, pre-structured and pre-connected to the rest."
Semantics Incorporated: Tying Web 3.0, the Semantic Web and Linked Data Together - Part 3/3: Structuring Chaos:
As is so often the case, Greg Boutin has really nailed it with this statement. It points to a frustration that I have had for some time with the proponents of Semantic Web (of which I am one). I am still relatively naive in this game (as my attendance at the New York Semantic Web VoCamp verified), but already it is clear to me that there are two fundamental questions that need answering:
1. What is the value and application of this technology -- even hypothetically?
and
2. How does it get built?
However satisfactory the answers to #1 might be, the answer to #2 is perhaps the most vexing to me. My home page is in RDFa and validates at the W3C. But, it took me the better part of an hour to do some very simple markup on a very simple page (adhering for the time being, to the taxonomy that Google has created for their "Rich Snippets" feature).
How does the web get 'cleaned-up, pre-structured and pre-connected'? Greg suggests that the only satisfactory way to do this is with human actors centrally involved.
If that is really the case, isn't the dream of the semantic web quite hopeless? Is there a Dreamweaver with a 'Meaning-Editor add-in? What is this editor hooked to? How fast can we get it to work, when the WWW is churning out terabytes of new data every day/hour/minute?
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