Shirky on SemWeb

Cory Doctorow 1:01 am Sat Nov 8, 2003

Clay Shirky has published a ringing denouncement of the Semantic Web, pointing out that this is a project that elides the hard bits and solves the easy bits — it's not far off from the digital identity world, where 70 percent of the use cases are easy problems that could be solved with some new W3C form elements, and the remainder are deep, philosophical problems we've been arguing about since Roman times.

First, take some well-known problem. Next, misconstrue it so that the hard part is made to seem trivial and the trivial part hard. Finally, congratulate yourself for solving the trivial part.

All the actual complexities of matching readers with books are waved away in the first sentence: "You browse/query until you find a suitable offer to sell the book you want." Who knew it was so simple? Meanwhile, the trivial operation of paying for it gets a lavish description designed to obscure the fact that once you've found a book for sale, using a credit card is a pretty obvious next move…

No one who has ever dealt with merging databases would use the word 'simply'.

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