Tim Berners Lee on the semantic web
Next week I will be speaking at Intelligent Content 2009. The Rockley Group states that intelligent content is not limited to one purpose, technology or output. It’s structurally rich and semantically aware and is therefore automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable. And intelligent content isn’t just a future, it’s possible now, as Tim Berners Lee states in an interview on YouTube. But for content to be intelligent you need a design.
Tuesday we organized a workshop for a client of ours who is currently implementing a new way of working (virtual collaboration) with MS Sharepoint as IT support. The crucial formal information around organization, processes and products is, as they put it, well under control, but it covers only 10% of all information in their organization. The rest will be solved with the implementation of Sharepoint.
So I put it to them: what if that other 90% of information, the informal information, got lost over night. Would that threaten the contingency of your company? They all looked a bit taken aback: of course it would! Then I continued: as a company, don’t you want to know which information exactly within that big grey mass is so important to the survival of your company? Don’t you want to make sure it is managed properly and used properly?
This does not directly change all your information into formal information with its strict creation, review and sign-off processes, the world isn’t that black and white. But it does create a responsibility to get to know your information, to decide whether to manage it strictly, or to at least provide metadata. Metadata not only to find information, but metadata that allows the finder to decide how valuable the information is, to decide whether it is still applicable, whether to trust it as source for the decisions he or she needs to make.
Tim Berners Lee talks in the interview on YouTube on the semantic web on how it may solve some of the huge challenges humanity will have to face (@3:15). If you know which questions to ask, people are great a correlating information. But still you need to be able to judge information on its merits. Would you want your doctors to trust any source on the Internet? Wikipedia?
I wonder, how (and how fast) will the semantic web change or daily lives?
