(2003-07-24) Rdf Social Meaning

Kendall Grant Clark on issues unresolved at a meeting in March regarding the Semantic Web/RDF and Social Meaning. Basically the super-formalist (Artificial Intelligence) types are accusing Tim Berners Lee and other Semantic Web proponents of not having their shit down when it comes to formal Knowledge Representation, which could result in a Semantic Web with no valuable semantics (my layman's interpretation). Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the entire social meaning debate is the degree to which people uncritically defer to Berners-Lee's "intuition" and "vision", that is, to his admittedly incompletely expressed idea about the Semantic Web. Few people think that Berners-Lee's ideas about the Semantic Web are perfectly or completely formed. Everyone, including Berners-Lee himself, agrees that they are intuitions, which implies the idea that he can see further than he can say, that he can reach further than he can grasp, at least for now.

Here's a theory Of The Day: eventually we'll have to have some sort of Fuzzy Logic built into the Semantic Web - rather like Idea Futures where one thinks in terms of "likelihood of truth". I think that could still be extremely useful (analogous to Search Engine Relevance Ranking), but maybe not something that would let you build agents you'd trust to buy plane tickets for you. (Or maybe you would, given a "likelihood" threshhold...).