Nov 06
15
Charlie Brown said it best…
“Good grief!”
The printed version of the New York Times had a front page story on Web 3.0, a.k.a., the Sematic Web, a.k.a., the World Wide Database, this past Sunday. First of all, the trend of versioning the Web needs to stop. It is silly and non-sensical.
As far as the story is concerned, this says it all:
…the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.”
The thing about Holy Grails is that they tend to be the stuff of legend. A computer that could perform such a task is only going to be found in the legends about the future: science fiction literature. I am not quite sure why people think that a computer could do a better job than a person at being a travel agent. Perhaps too many people have been ripped off by the human versions and have some strange faith that a computer would dutifully book their dream vacation. I suspect the same people trust electronic voting machines, too.
I think the author of the piece would have done well to look at the seminal refutation to the notion of such a smart and well designed Internet: Metacrap, by Cory Doctorow. Here is the side of the story that was missing:
If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata for the purposes of describing their goods, services and information, it would be a trivial matter to search the Internet for highly qualified, context-sensitive results: a fan could find all the downloadable music in a given genre, a manufacturer could efficiently discover suppliers, travelers could easily choose a hotel room for an upcoming trip.
A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It’s also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities.
Human knowledge can be described by machines but you ultimately need to look at what that description boils down to: a string of 1’s and 0’s. It is only after you assemble the binary patterns into the complex patterns that through a series of transformations designed and developed by people that you end up with a form of information that truly answers the question you are looking to answer, is this a good place to vacation with a kid? Human knowledge is entangled with the experiences that a machine will never be able to emulate. I am afraid that until a computer knows what it is like to have a child and sip a pina colada (but not too much pina colada, because you have a child after all…) it will always make a terrible travel agent.