Saturday, August 4, 2007

Another Road to Web 3.0

Web 3.0 is beginning, in some circles, to be associated with the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web and Wisdi are related by the goal of creating machine usable knowledge on the internet. However, their architecture is very different.

To achieve a semantic web one needs technologies like XML, RDF, OWL and others applied at the source of the data. The Semantic Web is a distributed knowledge model. A Wisdi in contrast is a centralized knowledge model.

The past 15 or so years of computing practice has instilled a dogma that "distributed = good" and "centralized = bad". However, in the case of the goals of Web 3.0, a centralized approach may be a more viable model.

One of the major objections to the semantic web is that people are "too lazy and too stupid" to reliably markup their web pages with semantic information. Here is where a Wisdi can come to the rescue. A fully realized Wisdi will have a rich store of knowledge about the world and the relationships between things in the world. Together with a natural language parser, a Wisdi can provide a "Semantic Markup Service" that will automate Web 3.0. Initially, this capability might still require some cooperation from human creators of web pages. For example, it will be quite some time before a Wisdi can deal with disambiguation problems with high degrees of reliability. However, requiring a bit of meta form content producers is a more viable model then asking them for the whole thing.

What do you think?

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