After a deep conversation with my dad on semantic web stuff, he pointed me to a site (of some guys he works with) that had this quote (below, pulled from another site to give it more – context).
Link: Managing Information: Infoglut:
“Information overload is not a function of the volume of information out there,” he says. “It’s a gap between the volume of information and the tools we have to assimilate that information into useful knowledge.”
But, it is really not infoglut that is on my mind, but how we can revel in the glut, navigate it, annotate it, contribute to it, and extract knowledge from it to generate new knowledge.
A lot of thoughts on this in my backlog of posts. I hope I can get them up during my lifetime…
It will be a wonderful day when everything can be expressed with RDFa, but then what? Your dad certainly has a point about tools, but before the tools even get created the actual task they’re trying to accomplish needs to be defined.
Finding data that is relevant to what you’re doing is very difficult when computers don’t know anything about you, what you’ve done in the past, what you consider important.
OpenID, APML and everything else the data portability group is trying to do is construct the groundwork, the foundation, for the semantic web. Then and only then can we start building tools on top of this base to give us the data that is meaningful and relevant to us.
2007 was all about the social network, 2008 will be all about the individual, 2010 (hopefully) will be about connecting individuals with data in ways that we can’t even imagine today.
Like you I have some thoughts on the semantic web and what it will mean for us, but also like you I find the burden of penning the words too great since one tangent leads to another leads to another and so on.