(2002-04-30) e

Jon Udell predicts the bootstrapping process of the Semantic Web: It's easy to imagine an evaluation function that's sensitive to the sizes of the business entities, the durations of the partnerships, the job-posting patterns in various cities, and a million other things. Visualizing these dimensions would be a worthy challenge for a graph-based interface. Semantic web visionaries suppose that all this metadata will be encoded in standard ways, and will then unlock these powerful evaluation functions. I think it's going to happen the other way around. Web APIs will surface whatever meager bits of metadata already exist. Applications will combine these APIs to create novel effects. Then metadata will be incrementally improved in order to enhance the effects.