Business Web

Metadata, Semantics and All That "I’m closer to the Semantic Web project than most, and remain significantly unconvinced, but I don’t think dismissing it is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, and anyhow shooting fish in a barrel is unsportsmanlike and generally sucks...It’s in the Metadata Right at the moment, a lot of the Semantic Web theory is doomed to remain just that—theory—because it relies on the existence of a critical mass of metadata, and if we’ve learned one thing in recent decades it’s that there is no such thing as cheap metadata. I’m pretty convinced that if you could build up a lot more metadata you could make the Web a more useful place, and I’ve thought a whole lot about this problem over the years, and really haven’t made much progress...However, if all of a sudden there were a million machine-readable business facts there for anyone to read, I think that quite a few software-savvy and accounting-savvy entrepreneurs would retreat into their garages and there would be some considerable surprises in store."