Kate Ray posted this video a couple of months ago; the usual suspects will soon pick it up and blog it because it features interviews with Tim Berners-Lee, Clay Shirky, and David Weinberger; I just hope that they take time to think about it, because this is the first-ever semantic web documentary with which I largely agree – however I feel it doesn’t make its points clearly enough.

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

Catch the bylines that fly past in the first 5 minutes:

• [the] ability to create information has exceeded our ability to manage it
• [we are] drowning in our richness
• [there is] no way to help you deal with it
• [the web has] massive amount of potential, but not any real tools to harness it
• [the new web] is gonna be billions … trillions of pages … Google doesn’t scale to that
• people are overwhelmed … [they are] less likely to buy something … less likely to be happy with what they buy
• we have too many e-mails … labels … soon we’ll have “labels for labels”
• …you need some structure…
• how do i find the right file?
• how do i keep up with all of these new sources of information?

All relentlessly negative, as a setup for the Semantic Web debate; undoubtedly the best line is from that section is:

“That [value] is what the semantic web could eventually promise to do!”

– a glorious example of what Wikipedia calls [weasel words] – it COULD EVENTUALLY PROMISE. Would you loan someone money on the basis that they could eventually promise to pay you back?

Thankfully the documentary moves midsection of criticism with which I largely agree; Shirkey’s “Witness Protection Program for AI Researchers” rings true to me, I’ve always felt that making people meet the machines halfway was a mistake — not to mention boring for the poor person who has to look up how to tag their blogpost using centrally-approved Dewey2.0 XML.

Then onto some schismists at a semantic web conference, one of whom dares to voice the proposition that the semantic web “does not need ontologies” to the horror of the panel participants; for those of you who’ve never encountered the word before, the pro-ontology people essentially propose that there needs to be a unified standard for annotating every bit of data on the web; this quote from Tom Gruber puts it nicely:

Ontologies are enabling technology for the Semantic Web. They are a means for people to state what they mean by the terms used in data that they might generate, share, or consume.

For instance, my example of this would be:

“This Blog Post is about my Mum. My Mum is the primary Person entity who has both a Female attribute, and a Parental attribute with respect to me, and the Parental attribute has sub-attributes of Biological and Social which may or may not refer to the same Person”

… if you supply such information alongside your blog posts then it will make life much easier for semantic search engines to determine that the blog post is about your Mum, as opposed to more mundanely and fuzzily searching your blog for the strings Mum / Mom / Mater / Mere / Mutter / Moeder / Matka / Parental / Crumbly Old Bat / That Bitch … in whatever textual encoding your blog is written-in.

I’m all for ontologies, just so long as every single person on the planet gets to use at least one of their own design, or none at all; but since that position is essentially the same as not wanting ontologies at all, I suppose I fall into the latter camp.

Regrettably it’s around that point that the video ends. I don’t understand why, I don’t know what Kate’s trying to say – if anything? Having ripped-open a key question at the heart of the semantic web, it’s left hanging and we segue: a piano plays, TBL speaks, some people talk about future coolness, but there is no resolution and frankly little-enough clarity unless you already have an understanding of that about which they’re talking; plus there’s that the first three minutes don’t match the middle critique/schism sections.

However: if you watch the whole thing, and mentally chop off the beginning and the end, I think it provides a platform for some very interesting thoughts.