“In contrast, 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.” That’s the crux of the advent of Web 3.0, also known as the semantic web, as defined by John Markoff for the New York Times. The semantic web, first envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee in 1999, is farther off than Markoff and the cheerleaders would like us to believe.
The idea that computers will be able to form intelligent—or even seemingly intelligent—connections between bits of data is a very difficult—“nontrivial” in geekspeak—problem. Even with some of computing’s best minds, including Danny Hillis, on the case it’s doubtful that anything remotely resembling the truly semantic web will be accomplished in my lifetime.
Nonetheless, Markoff’s breathlessness is disturbing, and for a reason that he mostly glosses over. Nicholas Carr sums it up nicely:
“While it will be easy for you to mine meaning about vacations and other stuff, it will also be easy for others to mine meaning about you. In fact, Web 3.0 promises to give marketers, among others, an uncanny ability to identify, understand, and manipulate us—without our knowledge or awareness. If you’d like a preview, watch Dan Frankowski’s presentation You Are What You Say and Oren Etzioni’s presentation All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Google, and then connect the dots.”
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