Clay Cements the Semantic
Posted on:: November 7th, 2003
Clay takes apart the Semantic Web, starting small and heading towards the big and beautiful. He ends by pointing out that metadata is politics and that there is a virtue to messiness.
It’s a brilliant piece and I’d be much happier about it if the ending points weren’t ones I’ve been trying to write about for a few months. Damn that Shirky!
Categories: Uncategorized dw
As right as Clay is–I agree with the conclusions–he’s also congratulating himself for disproving trivial examples (to borrow one of his phrases).
I barely remember syllogistic logic, but I think Clay’s knowledge is fuzzier than mine. He presents “People who live in Brooklyn speak with a Brooklyn accent” as if he doesn’t know what a universal quantifier is.
And he probably missed the irony of this statement: “we almost never use actual deductive logic.” Uh, did he etch all 3600 words into a stone tablet, or write them on a computer and send them out on a network? Oh right, computers don’t use logic…
Cardinal and ordinal worldviews, more on data and desire (response to David Weinberger, part 2.5)
I was thinking that this book might be a useful resource to read if you are thinking about David Weinberger’s Metadata and Desire or about anything I wrote in response to it.
Pass It Around
There’s a buzz going around about Clay Shirky’s recent dissection of the Semantic Web, a well-deserved buzz. I usually go to Clay’s site expecting to read something sharp and insightful, but with emphasis that seems misplaced to me (t…
Clay’s got it right. Especially the part about making trivial things seem hard and the inability of this group to really demonstrate the utility of Semantic web applications.
I can also vouch for the “gene” example. In the lifesciences, I’ve watched the silly battles over the “best” representation of gene, etc. and they seem to make the smartest and most earnest people seem really out of touch compared to the people who are writing today’s software. It turns out “best” is what is simple and what gets used – usually through open source – as is the case with the Gene Ontology. But biologists who never programmed cannot help but bash such ontologies because they’re always missing something that they feel is a crucial to _truly_ understanding a gene, a protein, a disease, or an organism. Of course they are! It is their nature to be an incomplete abstraction, and we don’t need to unify abstractions – just let people vote by using it or not (or building your own).
The Semantic Web truly is a new haven for AI types, and these folks are still challenged to show the true relevance of what they propose as Clay states.
Deconstructing The Syllogistic Shirky
Clay Shirky published a paper titled, The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview and made some interesting arguments. However, overall, I must agree with Sam Ruby’s assessment: Two parts brilliance, one part strawman. First, Clay makes a point that syl…
I still think there’s plenty of room for your views on this, David – I’m afraid Shirky’s piece doesn’t hold water very well. Jay Fienberg has a list of crit at:
http://icite.net/blog/200311/semantic_systemantics.html