Clay Shirky: Where the Semantic Web gets it wrong

An interesting, but frustrating read. Shirky makes statements that conflate what requires thought with what's hard and what's hard with what's impossible.

For example, he says:

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Consider the following assertions:

    - Count Dracula is a Vampire
    - Count Dracula lives in Transylvania
    - Transylvania is a region of Romania
    - Vampires are not real

You can draw only one non-clashing conclusion from such a set of assertions -- Romania isn't real. That's wrong, of course, but the wrongness is nowhere reflected in these statements. There is simply no way to cleanly separate fact from fiction, and this matters in surprising and subtle ways that relate to matters far more weighty than vampiric identity.

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Note the last part: There is simply no way to cleanly separate fact from fiction. Usually statements that start off as "there is simply no way" are wrong and this one is no exception. This and many of the other objections he raised can be addressed by using the right ontologies in combination with techniques like fuzzy logic and webs of trust.

Also, one of his big arguments is that the Semantic Web will never work because the data will always incomplete. He characterizes the Semantic Web as assuming a simple world in which all information is known. This is completely false though, as the Semantic Web standards have specifically been architected with the Open World Assumption in mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_World_Assumption

That's a pretty fundamental thing to get wrong if you're going to try to talk intelligently about these issues.

And my response http://semanticsearch.org/where-clay-shirky-misses-semantic-...

In summary:

[The article] misses the true tact of the current semantic web - which is focused on three key areas:

   1. identity
   2. creating quality data (whether manually or using Natural Language processing)
   3. scaling to be a giant, online database