You say Tomato...
Basically Web pages will no longer be just pages, or posts. They’ll all be split up into little objects, stored in a database (a massive, scalable one at that) and then your words can be displayed in different ways. Imagine a really awesome search engine that could bring back much much more granular stuff than Google can today. Or, heck, imagine you could view my blog by posts with most inbound links.
This is in reference to Radar Networks, which is apparently in stealth mode (yawn). Here's the thing though: unless I misunderstand the above, I see two problems:
- All kinds of possible copyright questions, depending on what (and how much) gets cached
- The "meta-search" objection that Jason Calacanis brings up
I'd be curious to know how those things will get resolved, or why they aren't actually problems.
Technorati Tags: semantic-web
Comments
Extension of the existing web
[Danny] April 5, 2007 17:25:15.329
Hi James, good points, I've passed them on to SWEO as potential FAQ questions.
A quick first pass at answering them :
caching & copyright - the web already has extensive caching with HTTP GET, but this hasn't caused a huge copyright problem
metasearch - I haven't got a complete answer, but there are at least two factors that may make it less of an issue than it might seem. First, search engines generally operate as big, centralised indexes. One of the features of the Semantic Web is that it is decentralised in the same way as the web it extends (lots of systems at lots of scales, fractal). So although there may be metasearch issues for superpeers (which is what Radar Network's setup sounds like being), it shouldn't be a showstopper in general. Also, there's less need for search engines when you don't lose things in the first place ;-) What I mean is e.g. timbl's Tabulator semweb browser lets you navigate data while only keeping a very limited amount of session material locally, but you can still find information in a targetted fashion (there isn't so much indirection of data through human-readable text).
The other factor is that there's an increasing amount of Open Data being published (e.g. that of Wikipedia) which can be leveraged as part of semantic navigation/search (e.g. as in dbpedia.org).