The Fool on Morville on the Semantic Web
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Act II, Sc. V
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Lear: Alas: the giftor dispossessed.
Fool: How know nuncle! Dost thou knowest, nuncle, that in Ambient Findability, Peter Morville includes a discussion of the Semantic Web. Morville’s discussion principally revolves around what he terms the “snarky crossfire” between Semantic Web proponents, led by Tim Berners-Lee, and “loosely joined swarms of bloggers and social software advocates” (Morville 2005, 121). Morville (2005, 121) traces the roots of this disagreement to an article written by Tim Berners-Lee and others in which it was argued that the “Semantic Web will ‘bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users.’” In reaction to this article, Weinberger argued that the Semantic Web would disappoint, as “‘normalization of metadata works real well in confined applications where the payoff is high, control is centralized, and discipline can be enforced. In other words: not the Web’” (Morville 2005, 123). Weinberger’s critical comments were followed by Shirky who “described the Semantic Web as a shared world-view embedded in metadata and ‘political philosophy masquerading as code’” (Morville 2005, 124). The combative tenure of this discussion did not continue, Morville (2005, 124) notes thankfully, as other individuals “seized the opportunity to use the Semantic Web as a boundary object to build shared understanding.” These “boundary spanners,” as Morivlle (2005, 124) calls them, “showed that whil most of the lofty goals espoused [by Berners-Lee et al] are unrealistic, much of the work on triple storage, trust metrics, semantic disambiguation, and ontology exchange may prove worthwhile.”
[Exuent.
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Fool’s Work Cited
Morville, Peter. 2005. Ambient Findability.
