Semantic Web

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic: a Web in which machine reasoning will be ubiquitous and devastatingly powerful

The entertainment system was belting out the Beatles' "We Can Work It Out" when the phone rang. When Pete answered, his phone turned the sound down by sending a message to all the other local devices that had a volume control. His sister, Lucy, was on the line from the doctor's office: "Mom needs to see a specialist and then has to have a series of physical therapy sessions. Biweekly or something. I'm going to have my agent set up the appointments." Pete immediately agreed to share the chauffeuring.

http://www.semanticweb.org/

I am a big skeptic because I think most "interesting" data is very context-sensitive, and thus "processing" data across contexts (e.g. pretending there's transitive truth) is high risk. (All models are wrong)

http://infomesh.net/2001/swintro/: The Semantic Web is a mesh of information linked up in such a way as to be easily processable by machines, on a global scale. You can think of it as being an efficient way of representing data on the World Wide Web, or as a globally linked database.

http://logicerror.com/semanticWeb-long by Aaron Swartz

tutorial using N3.

What are some attractive (to me) applications of the Semantic Web?

• Reputation Management aggregated across lots of sources (Comments by and about a certain person or organization - Annotation Systems)

• event calendar tracker: agent that watches for alerts you to coming (local) events that may be of interest based (low-tech) on keyword matches

• Danny Ayers thinks the RssAggregator space makes sense to explore.

• Paul Ford vision of EBay competitor: 2002-07-30-b