Bricks and Boxes

This is part of a short series of posts introducing Podcamp Pittsburgh 4.

I don’t get to talk with Vasco Pedro enough, or I don’t know enough other people to teach me about the semantic web and with whom I can kick around my underdeveloped understanding of ontology. It’s pretty darned fun, though. The possibilities for marking up information on the web so computers can understand it, thus helping them find it or process it beyond human capacity, is delightful.

As complex and expansive as semantics may be, it is already totally relevant to our practical lives. (see Google.com) So here Vasco will provide Podcampers with a little summary.

Smarter Media: The Semantic Web

An explanation of the semantic web and its uses most practical to users who generate content. Vasco Pedro co-founder and CEO of Bueda, a semantic-matching platform, and a research assistant at Carnegie Mellon University. Intermediate to Aspergers.

For a different opinion, I plan to read Cory Doctorow’s 2001 essay “Metacrap: Putting the tourch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia.”

Doctorow’s seven insurmountable obstacles to reliable metadata are:

1. People lie
2. People are lazy
3. People are stupid
4. Mission Impossible: know thyself
5. Schemas aren’t neutral
6. Metrics influence results
7. There’s more than one way to describe something

Of course, in 2001 Doctorow probably didn’t understand search engines would work as they do today.