Bell Tolls for the Semantic Web
Created by Catherine Howell (University of Cambridge) on March 27, 2007
Stephen Downes' post over at Half an Hour on the likely future of the Semantic Web has sparked a rich and fascinating discussion. Stephen's post started with web standards, but his wider message touches on issues of business practice, corporate vs OSS development models, identity and data management, and plain old user preferences, among many other issues.
I recently submitted a proposal to the ALT-C 2007 conference about personal archiving practices - investigating some of the ways that we take care of our personal data (or don't) in an era of fast-multiplying accounts (commercial and non-commercial) and ever-more-widely distributed personal data. Issues of trust are becoming critical - who can I trust to take care of my data? (See also the wiki notes for the seminar organised by Graham Attwell and the Bazaar team, "Hey Dude, Where's My Data?").
For me, it all starts and ends with the individual. So this is the section of Stephen's post that really spoke to me:
I recently submitted a proposal to the ALT-C 2007 conference about personal archiving practices - investigating some of the ways that we take care of our personal data (or don't) in an era of fast-multiplying accounts (commercial and non-commercial) and ever-more-widely distributed personal data. Issues of trust are becoming critical - who can I trust to take care of my data? (See also the wiki notes for the seminar organised by Graham Attwell and the Bazaar team, "Hey Dude, Where's My Data?").
For me, it all starts and ends with the individual. So this is the section of Stephen's post that really spoke to me:
"Yeah - we'll play games on Yahoo, create a not-too-serious blog with Google, post some tunes on MySpace (under an alias of course), and mess around with some photos on Flickr.
And we'll even go along with some unimportant things, like the university account and email, so we can access the course notes on Blackboard. The personal email address, that we got from our ISP, we will tell only to our closest friends - and we'll use the gmail account for logons and the Yahoo identity for spam.
We'll post to these Web 2.0 sites, but if the content means anything, we'll keep a copy on our computer as well (until Windows crashes and eats all your data, that is).
But trust them? Not a chance.
The future of the web will be based on personal computing."
And we'll even go along with some unimportant things, like the university account and email, so we can access the course notes on Blackboard. The personal email address, that we got from our ISP, we will tell only to our closest friends - and we'll use the gmail account for logons and the Yahoo identity for spam.
We'll post to these Web 2.0 sites, but if the content means anything, we'll keep a copy on our computer as well (until Windows crashes and eats all your data, that is).
But trust them? Not a chance.
The future of the web will be based on personal computing."
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