Tuesday, September 23, 2003

Semantic Web Economically Infeasible

Distributed Computing Economics and the Semantic Web "Now along comes Gray, making an argument that, when you think about it, implies that the semantic web, as currently conceived, might just be all wrong. His basic point is that it's far cheaper to vend high-level apis than give access to the data (because the cost of shipping large amounts of data around is prohibitive). Since the semantic web is basically a data web, one wonders: why doesn't Gray's argument apply?"

Early on, I came across Open Source Distributed Capabilities, Smart Contracts and the idea of Agoric Computation. It formed the basis of Mariposa and was mentioned in an article in Wired called "The New Economy of Computation". It mentions that agoric systems have been described since the late 80s.

Agoric Open Systems "Agoric systems should form an attractive knowledge medium. In a large, evolving system, where the participants have great but dispersed knowledge, an important principle is: "In the incentive structure lies the power". In particular, the incentives of a distributed, charge-per-use market can widen the knowledge engineering bottleneck by encouraging people to create chunks of knowledge and knowledge-based systems that work together."

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