LarryRoth.net

An interesting news item disclosed a discussion between Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and the Director of Search at Google, Peter Norvig. Mr. Norvig presented what he felt are very tangible road blocks to the usefulness of the Semantic Web. His concerns are:

• Incompetent content providers
• A lack of support for standardization
• Deliberate deception[1]

These are all valid points, and specifically, I think we are already seeing quite a bit of deception. Some content owners deliberately provide false metadata in order to improve their ranking. Tag spam and keyword stuffing are just a couple examples of this.

What was Berners-Lee’s response? He feels that the Semantic Web can increase relevance by identifying the content’s originator and why the content can be trusted.[2]

[1] Google exec challenges Berners-Lee, http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Google_exec_challenges_Berners_Lee/0,2000061733,39263931,00.htm, posted July 19, 2006, viewed July 19, 2006
[2] ibid.