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MIT’s Technology Review has an interview today with Tim Berners Lee (free subscription required), the guy who invented the web in the early 1990s and is working to make it a lot smarter. His vision would have the web be able to access vast networks of meaning, not just individual web pages, in order to (in the now-hacknied example) be able to book an airline flight for you using automated web agents. It’s an ambitious plan that would require the web adhering to an increasingly complex set of standards to allow common definitions, the creation of interacting ontologies, and the ability for automated “web bots” to make elaborate logical inferences to carry out actions. I wrote a slightly breathless essay a year ago on the Semantic Web’s potential to augment or—menacingly— supplant the capacities of human memory. With apologies to medieval codicologists and paleographers (those who tend to know what they’re talking about when discussing medieval manuscript and handwriting development) I made some fast and loose comparisons between the web and medieval books. The current web (or parts of it) is adopting more structural complexity (through tools such as XML and the Resource Description Framework) that appears to parallel certain 9-12th century developments in medieval book design (such as the introduction of word spacing, section headings and indexes) that make information easier to read and use. But where one might argue that medieval books became more structurally efficient to help people remember what was written there, the Semantic Web appears to promise that people won’t have to remember anything at all.
Berners-Lee says little new in the interview, and skirts the Semantic Web’s major challenge of attempting to have the loose baggy monster of the existing web evolve into the highly structured machine that would be its Semantic counterpart. Standards, yes, but open, public and free, yes too. Good luck, sir.
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