Imagining the Semantic Economy:
Imagine a global economy in which every piece of information is linked directly to its meaning and origin. In which queries produce answers, not expensive, time-consuming evaluation tasks. Imagine a world in which reliable, intelligent information structures give everyone an equal ability to make profitable decisions, or in many cases, profitable new information products. Imagine companies that get paid for the information they generate or collect based on its value to end users, rather than on the transitory attention it generates as it passes across a screen before disappearing into oblivion.
This is exactly the opportunity.
2 Comments
It’s like Semantic Web / Ontology / OWL from a decade ago, all over again… Only last time, it didn’t work because it was too hard for most developers to set up, and too hard to manage. Then we tried “folksonomy”, via tags that were easy for developers to set up, but hard to manage. Hopefully we find another solution that’s “just right”, because content is such a bear.
If I were working on this problem, I’d look for how I could solve my own needs first from a semantic approach. Part of it is about ease of use, but I think the larger issue is identifying the practical personal application. It’s easier to worry about interchange once you have a corpus of data to start with.