I will never support the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web, or (sigh) Web 3.0 as some might say, is certainly a hotly debated subject. To laymen, the Semantic Web often appears as a science fiction derivative masquerading as a technological imperative. Our lives will be changed forever, and the Web will morph into a complex, but organized intelligence capable of telling you what you need to know with pinpoint accuracy.

The seminal work that envisioned such a Utopia, was published by Scientific American, and written by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila.

Supposedly, the assemblage and delivery of this information can be accomplished when responsible bodies not unlike the W3C, can decide on a semantic language. The Semantic Web will be built to compliment, and eventually replace some current languages and technologies. Developers creating Web sites will be responsible for implementing the proper semantic tags, user agents will interpret these tags, infer that certain relationships exist, and provide a set of results.

It sounds rather nice. Search engines will no longer be necessary, and brilliant personal user agents could even replace browsers altogether. Before jumping on the bandwagon though, it might be worth your while to consider this initiative, and why it will never come to full fruition. I am not a pessimist, but a realist, and I have done the research. The conclusion? I will never support the Semantic Web.

The Semantic Web will be unable to identify relationships from natural language

In other words, there is more than one way to describe something. Aside from strict rules that govern some data formats, like a phone number or mailing address, a description can vary significantly. I am five feet and eleven inches tall, and I weigh two hundred and twenty pounds. In the Philippines, I might be labeled a large individual. How about in Houston, Texas, the fattest city in America according to a 2006 study by Men’s Fitness magazine? A person residing in this city might consider me to be of rather average size.

This is an unsophisticated example, but it provides an ample illustration regarding interpretation based upon experience and environment. Most people using the Internet want to be able to identify and locate information using natural language that is personal and basic. This is why Flickr’s introduction of tagging was so popular and garnered such widespread adoption. The process of identification was facilitated by humans, and therefore, allowed a more diverse interpretation of a visual medium.

The Semantic Web will not bring us any closer to this reality because machines are unable to interpret data that is subjective unless complex algorithms are built around it. These are algorithms that already exist today, and are built by humans to search the Web as it exists.

The Semantic Web will be just as susceptible to information manipulation

Even if the Semantic Web could manage the inferred relationships between two sources of information, who is to say that the content presented is accurate? It may be formatted properly, and communicate details and specifications based upon recognized standards, but what “weight” will it be given? Google has a PageRank, and Alexa an Alexa Rating, just to name two. What will the Semantic Web use to disseminate and aggregate data when almost identical relationships are available for consideration?

In this case, users will still be required to interpret the information presented, and if there is customizable software that analyzes and builds result sets based upon criteria you specify, what is to say I cannot “game the system”.

Consider a scenario in which a shopper would like to purchase a pair of jeans, between $25-50 USD, from a retailer no more than 15 miles away from her house. She will purchase the merchandise online, but the retailer must support in-store pickup, since she does not want to pay shipping. Theoretically, a Semantic Web accompanied by a user agent will be able to assist her with this seemingly precise purchase. That is, until she discovers not all merchants are actually selling the item she wants. They are advertising products that competitors have in stock, but do not inform her that she must special order the item.

The Semantic Web is no more able to weed out these untrusted sources than Google, or any other search engine. You will still have to perform the leg work.

The Semantic Web will fail miserably at identifying trusted sources

There are some Semantic Web enthusiasts who would tell me that I am mistaken, and that systems built around semantics can interpret the knowledge available and identify a trusted source. For instance, consider our shopper looking for jeans online. Presumably, in the Semantic Web, she will be able to use semantics to tag Web sites as untrusted. When her friend (with whom she has a semantic relationship), decides to purchase an identical pair of jeans, he will be assisted with this additional information. Unfortunately, in her frustration, she has mistakenly tagged several of her friend’s favorite retailers as untrusted. Instead of sifting through a result set with too many results, he is now stuck refining his search so that it includes his favorite retailers, which is a tedious task.

If you apply the same trusted source scenario to users, it becomes even more complicated. What if you have been branded an untrusted source by an individual who has a broad spectrum of relationships. All of those other related entities, whether they be organizations or individuals, now consider you to be untrustworthy. If you have a poor experience with a bank or financial institution, the manager may choose to label you as untrusted. You could be denied goods or services as a direct result of bias, or a simple miscommunication. eBay power users know how important their feedback rating is to running a successful business. A spike in poor feedback can result in a drop in sales.

Conclusion

These are three very simple illustrations that demonstrate why machines and the Semantic Web are not capable of understanding the complexities of human thought. The Web is essentially a conglomeration of thought processes conveyed in the form of interactive mediums. The Semantic Web only serves to diminish the factors that make us human, and it will characterize our uniqueness through a series of predefined tags. The current Web offers us the ability to express ourselves in an unbound context, and the interpretations of those expressions can never be duplicated by a computer.

• Posted by Brian
• September 13th, 2007