Re: Semantic Web: Beyond Metadata

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Oct 19 2001 - 22:46:43 MDT


As far as I can tell, the W3C has just rediscovered the "semantic network"
that was popular with failed AI projects back in the 1950s. I'm not
saying that RDF is useless. But my advice is to immediately and
completely discount any statements about the Web "understanding" webpages,
"knowing the content", or anything else that implies Artificial
Intelligence capabilities. As near as I can figure, what the Semantic Web
actually does is allow programs to (a) recognize different tags as
referring to the same data through rendezvous on common associated
keywords, and to (b) recognize a little more of the formal structure in
data, over and above the inherent tree structure of XML. These are both
very important programmatic capabilities, but they are not semantic or AI
capabilities.

-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence



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