It’s already been quite a year on the semantic web front. Clearly RDFa is a big winner. And just when we thought we were getting a handle on the standards and protocols now we have RIF to learn.
When you see facebook adopting a version of RDFa then you can assume you are onto something. And now we’ve seen this.
Excellent piece by James Hendler
. Would be difficult to argue with: ‘the Web continues to increase in its importance to society and to science, and we now realize that the Web is a critical infrastructure on which we as a society, and a world, fundamentally rely’.
On the downside mentions some negatives e.g.’ to radically redefine individual privacy, and to expose our children to unprecedented levels of violence and pornography – disincentives to innovation’.
Have to say as someone who grew up in a time of far less surveillance this does worry me a lot for the kids of today. Many’s the stupid things that we did when we were growing up – which were better not being video’d and posted to the world. To be honest the prevalence of digital cameras and similar devices are probably more of the problem than the web itself. But I’m not sure hor w this will work itself out – potentially a nightmare version of Orwell’s 1984 is playing itself out – where Big Brother is now a combination of ‘citizens’ snooping on people and the web as Big Brother processing and forwarding the data.