Wednesday, August 06, 2003

8 bit Semantics

Semantic web 2003: not unlike making music on a TRS-80 in the 1970's "I think this is important in the way that creating better guitar fingerboards or better synthesizer sound algorithms is important. In other words, musicians often like better musical instruments and make use of their increased nuances to make and/or inspire more and better music.

With the semantic web, I don't think we even have many musical instruments yet, at this human interface level. The focus is really on the mechanics, in this case, of data and information. It is like having a TRS-80 and being focused on getting it to produce two musical notes at once or having control over the volume or timbre of the notes."

"The web is already pretty exciting—some people are making creative "musics" with it, and lots of people are tuning in. But, I think the semantic web adds little to that dynamic right now. It isn't accessible enough to affect how "web music" is being made or how "web music" is being heard—the interfaces are not there yet."

I don't know about this argument. Semantic Web technology is as far away as "Bookmarks" under Mozilla. The interfaces already exist for metadata - Apple's iTunes, it doesn't need to change if one day it supports RDF rather than ID3 tags. The interface to the baconizer doesn't need to change if they move to RDF. If anything the Semantic Web will enable richer interfaces, ones that return better results, you're already soaking in Semantic Web interfaces.

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