(2004-03-22) Van Dijck Semantic Web Themes

Peter Van Dijck on the various arguments around the Semantic Web. Nice summary, but didn't change my belief. Comparing it to SQL is completely bogus, because a Relational Data Base is generally designed within a single shared Context, so definitions can be agreed to. In fact, one of the huge challenges in the giant CRM/ERP projects is dealing with the fact that entities which seem identical ("customer") actually have different meanings in different applications/contexts, and therefore can't be easily mapped together. So pretending that you can easily merge tuples across sources with different ontologies is likely to cause some nasty problems.

On the other hand, if applications are designed to handle redundancy, ambiguity, and Fuzzy Logic to generate logical outcomes with a probability attached, and not let anyone treat those outcomes as 100% certain, then maybe we're OK. This reminds me of Peter Small's Stigmergic approach, where categories get you a shortlist, after which you use human interaction to refine an answer. But I've never seen the Semantic Web proponents argue this way.