セマンティクウェブ実現へのタイム・テーブル
セマンティクウェブ実現へかかる時間は冗談めいた予想ではweb88.0ではじめて実現するという話もあるけれども、Ian Davisはカスケーディング・スタイルシートCSSの普及にかかった時間を引き合いに出して予想していて、セマンティクウェブが広く普及するのは現実的に言っておよそ5年とみている。CSSの普及にはwaspのベンダーやウェブデザイナーに対する啓蒙活動が不可欠であったようにセマンティクウェブの普及にはSWEOの啓蒙が欠かせないがその活動ははじまったばかりだ。
There are ongoing efforts to change this situation - most notably the semantic Web, common ontologies, different Web2.0 technologies like taxonomies, folksonomies, microformats or tagging. The goal of these techniques is to make the documents understandable for machines to eliminate the problems stated above. While there are some promising results in this area already, there is a long way to go until the whole Web will be such a friendly place - my guess is that this will happen around Web88.0 in the optimistic case.
http://www.rubyrailways.com/data-extraction-for-web-20-screen-scraping-in-rubyrails-episode1
So is this the year of make or break? Hardly! We could do a gross comparison with CSS and equate CSS1 (1996) with the first RDF recommendation (1999). That suggests there's another 3 years before we can expect the Semantic Web to cross the chasm. However, I think the real comparison has to take into account the evangelism and activism around the technology. It's taken 9 years of WaSP cajoling vendors and pestering designers to get CSS to where it is today. The analogue here is SWEO the new Semantic Web Education and Outreach group. This group (I'm a lurking member) has only just started the battle that took WaSP 9 years to win! I'm hoping that the time frame for the Semantic Web crossing the chasm is somewhere between the two estimates; between 3 and 9 years. I'm hoping that it's going to be at the lower end of that scale, say 5 years, but that still means we have a long multi-year struggle to evangelise and persuade. It's going to be worth it!
http://iandavis.com/blog/2007/02/make-or-break-for-the-semantic-web