Re:Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?
by adw on Monday November 02, 2009 @05:41AM
(#916541)
Much of the web is databases with a thin layer on top, and the whole point of the SW/LD architecture is that different sites don't need to agree on ontology; it just becomes an alternate, aggregatable database view, in a sense.
I think a lot of the SW hype's overblown - and I've worked in the field - but you're attacking something which doesn't exist.
Re:Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?
by btilly on Monday November 02, 2009 @11:20AM
(#917064)
While it may not exist, there are still people who promote the possibility. In particular the person I am responding to subscribes to the vision enough to believe that some day the user supplied categorization will be sufficient to make Google unnecessary.
The Semantic Web depends on having everyone who writes web pages also categorize them. Whenever you have 20 different people categorizing content you're going to get 20 different interpretations of what the semantics mean. The vision of a decent, consistent categorization emerging across the web is a pipe dream.
Furthermore the fundamental problem that Google solves is not finding content. It is narrowing in on worthwhile content. In a world filled with people pushing commercial content with a dubious value proposition, you can't depend on content creators to provide an accurate assessment of their quality. That's where Google comes in. They not only categorize, they rank data well enough that end users are happy to accept the results.