Semantic vs. Synaptic Web

Word on the street has it that semantic has become a curseword and people should avoid using it at all cost, especially in relation to any sort of internet business or technology.

Hearing about this led me to wondering about why and how it was that the semantic web failed us so badly that even just using the word is bad for business. The first step on my adventure was figuring out what the semantic web promised us, because you can’t see where things went wrong if you don’t know what a movement tried to produce.

After a lot of googling and searching my memory for what people have said/promised over the years this is the best description I could find:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

– Tim Berners-Lee, 1999

Far as I can understand this means that the web will be organised in such a fashion machines could understand it perfectly and use it as some sort of huge collective brain – a bit like the Borg perhaps. This would indeed be a wonderful future, machines talking to machines, data flowing to and fro with perfect understanding of why, streamlined transactions optimised to perfection through better understanding of their environment …

The big flaw here is: machines talking to machines.

It would be difficult to say how exactly somebody came up with a concept of the internets that so deeply misses the whole point of why the internet is as popular as it is. Perhaps the reason is that the quote comes from 1999 when the web was a wholly different beast, but why then, pray tell, did entrepreneurs latch onto this idea only around 2005 when not much was different than today? If you’re looking for those answers, I’m not the man to ask, but I can tell you what the internet is about and how the synaptic web helps there.

The internet is people talking to people

When it comes to the internet it’s all about being social, about following your friends and having conversations. Nobody cares anymore about finding data, that’s all on wikipedia, at worst a google search away, nobody cares anymore about computers talking to computers. In fact I’d wager a nice lump of money that most user’s eyes would glaze over when you started talking about all of that.

This is where I believe the semantic web has failed us, the users, and investors and pretty much anyone who wanted to do anything serious with it. Semantics are a good background protocol, a lovely standard for obsessive webdevs to follow, an amazingly good technology … but in and of itself without a purpose.

The only people that needed the semantic web were [are] developers, there is no product to be found therein, Zemanta‘s tool is probably the closest one can come to a semantic product and even that probably has far more magic in everything but semantics.

We need computers that understand people and this is something you, of course, need semantics for. It’s also something that produces immediate value to the only person that really matters – The User.

tl;dr version: The Synaptic Web will not fail us because it focuses on users.

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• Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Structured Data (readwriteweb.com)
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• Sir Tim BernersLee demands more ‘raw data’ from Government (telegraph.co.uk)

This entry was written by swizec, posted on January 4, 2010 at 9:27 am, filed under synaptic web and tagged Google, History, Search Engines, Searching, Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web, Zemanta. Bookmark the permalink.
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