August 26th, 2006
Ian Delaney has written a nice layman’s overview of the semantic web (”the semantic lunch“), which I recommend to anyone who tends to get scared off by words like “ontology.” His blog posting is an interview with John Davies, who’s in charge of next-web research at BT (which, as an ignorant American, I can only assume once meant “British Telecom”).
I was pleased to see a real-world example of a company that actually has someone in charge of thinking about where the web is heading. Of course, you’d expect that in a company as large as BT, but I find that many large companies, staffed by otherwise intelligent IT professionals, are either oblivious of Web 2.0 or looking at it as a potential terrorist plot (remember how we used to worry about “Communist plots”?) like departmentally-controlled Intranets, or client-server computing, or PC’s and spreadsheets.
I was also happy to see an explanation of the semantic web in language that can be readily understood by people in all walks of life, not just Tim Berners-Lee and his fellow rocket scientists. But it apparently took a lot of work for Ian to make the explanation so readable, for he closes his post with the statement that, “I’ll leave this there for today. My head hurts already. If there’s interest, I’ll be happy to do a follow-up on another day.”
So let’s all write to Ian and tell him that we’re sending some aspirin in his direction, and when his headache has cleared up, would he please do a follow-up?
August 26th, 2006 at 1:24 pm
The world wide web consortium does jump in the deep end, even though Dr Berners Lee is relatively eloquent on what his mission is.
Another puzzle is why they don’t build on work from your peers, Grady Booch, James Rumbaugh, and Ivar Jacobson. The entire Semantic Web (or ontology as they like to call it) seems to reinvent a lot of standard object oriented modelling, without attribution. Is this another standards war ?