Blog Connections: Inventor of World Wide Web Comments on My Blog

Holy flipping cow! Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, just commented on my blog! No, not here, but on my DSU blog. On Saturday, I posted on the seeming difficulty of making the Semantic Web (technology for embedding machine-readable meaning in Web content) work on a large scale. I may be biased against Semantic Web technology based on a course I took on it this summer that left me thinking, "Wow, this is hard!"

And then along comes Tim Berners-Lee, MIT professor, director of the World Wide Web Consortium and World Wide Web Foundation, and long-time explainer of the Semantic Web to tell me I may have Semantic Web all wrong:

There is an interesting reason for which Semantic Web does scale: that it has interesting scale-free properties. Or rather, the world has interesting scale-free properties and the Sem Web technologies allow one to take advantage of. It doesn’t require a ruling elite, just everyone doing their bit, in different contexts, which then are stitched together at the edges. See http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Fractal#tco and compare that to the models used by previous systems.

I feel like I just got an autograph... and didn't have to ask for it! I'll never wash my blog again!

And anyone who says blogs are a waste of time promoting mindless jabber that leaves us teetering on the edge of cultural catastrophe is flat wrong.

Here's more from Berners-Lee on Semantic Web technology:



...and even more, a nice hour-long interview from MIT: