How New Social, Interconnected Applications Give Way To The Untapped Potential Of The Semantic Web

Robin Good's Latest News [CLB: Interesting Blog overall]

Examples of the fragmented web

• Ebay has a huge database of people selling stuff, which it matches to people looking for stuff
• Google has a massive index of web page content, which it matches to search phrases
• Friends Reunited has a database of where people went to school
• Car Harbor is a solution (currently in development) that will match people looking for car parking with people who have free space to rent
• Loads of dating sites have databases of people wanting to find people who want to find people
• LinkedIn has a database of businesspeople's information, and links between them

I could go on. What these applications have in common is that:

• They all try to match information with needs-for-information
• They all have their own databases that contain a small proportion of the information out there
• And their scope is limited to only the data they hold themselves

In other words, they all have part of the picture.

This means they can only try to find the best answer to what you need with the information avaialable.

It doesn't matter how much bigger or smarter these systems get, they're limited by the fragmented web version 1.0. Google or Ask.com will never be able to know what you really want when you search for 'home run'. This is because the current web is still locked into reductionism. Because all these applications are just part of a disconnected world of data, they're forced to reduce everything to their basic component parts.

[... read on for proposed solutions - Web 2.0]