lou and peterv on shirky on the semantic web

follow up to my earlier post on the shirky article

lou rosenfeld posts his take on the article - specifically on metadata

And yet to my complete shock, I increasingly hear the word metadata uttered with the same breathy excitement as such other recent panaceas as push, portals, and personalization. I'm aghast, yet in a sort of ironically pleasant way, as I've had to explain for years and years what metadata is and how it can be an important part of my clients' complete IA breakfast. But where balance of approaches, including metadata, makes sense, we instead encounter an attitude that a single silver bullet will do the trick cleanly and simply.

This all puts "LIS IAs" like me in an increasingly compromising position. With a background in librarianship, I ought to be gaga over metadata, muttering a mantra of "subject, author, title... subject, author, title...". Yet I find myself recommending that extensive investments in metadata be postponed, at least in the enterprise environment, in favor of less expensive and more feasible architectural approaches that won't go down in flames and force my clients into bankruptcy.

he goes on to say that there are 2 types of metadata - structural (attributes) and semantic (descriptive values that populate the attributes) and both "require an extensive investment to think through, develop, implement, and, perhaps most importantly, maintain" as information needs shift and evolve.

not to metion the difficulty in getting the departments of an organization to agree to both the attributes and their values. lou created a diagram to illustrate the reality of "structural interoperability and semantic merging".

and then there's peter van dijck's review of the ensuing discussion where he digs out the major themes and provides snippets of comments to support them. The themes he found are:

• What Is It
• Top Down Bottom Up
• Ontology Of Everything
• The Simple Life
• It Is Growing
• RDF Versus XML
• Real World Value
• Here Today
• Useful While We Are Get There
• Clay Misunderstands Syllogisms
• Doer Versus Talker

some highlights:

Top Down Bottom Up -

The second part of the top down approach, according to Shirky, is that semantic web people want to create top-down ontologies. Shirky really misses the ball here - most proponents of the semantic web don't believe in a global ontology.

RDF vs. XML -

Most people agree that RDF is kind of complex. Many people think it's not useful to use something so complex when they can do the same thing in simple XML without worrying about RDF. RDF is seen by some as an overly complex technology, trying to solve a problem XML and HTTP already solve.

Here Today -
from alex wright

Shirky nonetheless bases his argument on a central fallacy: the Semantic Web as monolith, as a single "thing" to be opposed or supported.

The Semantic Web is not an all-or-nothing proposition; it is a rubric describing a set of distinct (though related) technologies - RDF, FOAF, OWL, RSS, XML - all of which are designed to improve machine-to-machine communication [...].

And those technologies, like it or not, are already here.