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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

> 2.1 People lie

Was always my reaction when hearing about efforts like The Semantic Web.

"Yeah, we can get everyone to classify and tag their data with machine-readable metadata and then use that to build all sorts of amazing castles in the sky!"

"But what about when someone misuses this metadata to, for instance, get listed in categories they don't belong to, lie about content to reach more viewers, etc etc?"

Let the handwaving commence...

(Yes, various interesting things have fallen out of the research, but the overall drive always seemed naive)

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That might be the case for the internet, but in a company there can be real dedicated curation resources and a policy-driven schema and naming convention. I think the viability is different depending on the use case.

That said, I'm not sure universal exchange formats like OWL are really necessary for any use case. Maybe RDF is even overkill, but the concept of subject-predicate-object triples is powerful and opens up a nice space for using rules engines to explore amorphous and multi-dimensional graphs of data.

Also I think the line between data and metadata is pretty blurry and not so easy to separate. At what point is a property of an entity considered "meta"? I'd argue that if the thing it is on can be considered an entity at all, that collecting data about it is just part of the concrete definition.

It's interesting to note that in the case of books and publishing, content creation (authorship/publishing) and metadata classification (libraries, largely) are two separate domains conducted by entirely separate entities.

The separation isn't total --- publishers will typically indicate the genre or category of a work, for example. But even here there's generally a divide between authorship and editorialiship / publishing.

A strength and weakenss of the blogs and other individual authored-and-published works is that there is no such divide, and much incentive to misrepresent, without internal checks.

That's where a form of collaborative vetting of tagged data can be of help.

In your case you need to give more power to users to block people categorically and add reasons, and share their blocklists with their friends.

Anyone on a blocklist can be ignored or they can have a big warning placed next to them about what's wrong with them according to your friend.

That is what local communities already do. If Facebook will never include that functionality, then fine, but it is possible.

Also, if you are a liar (unwittingly or not), you should be directed to other liars just like yourself.

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