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Web Bazaar: The Problem of Abundance
8/6/2008
We Are Novices at Managing Abundance
Humans are much more experienced at dealing with scarcity than with abundance. Rarely in human history over millions of years has a large percentage of humans consistently had more of anything than they (we) needed. Yet, over just the past few decades, in many countries, humans are now dealing with a new problem, a super-abundance of things and, now, of information.
The obvious next phase of Web 2.0, the Semantic Web, faces an enormous problem: overwhelming data that is mostly undistinguished. For a few years, organizations have been creating ontologies (semanticized digital repositories) from their data store. Internally, these organizations are re-establishing a rational search of their own growing numbers of online artifacts.
When Can We Expect the Semantic Miracle?
Will we suddenly start getting only 492 hits instead of 492,000 when we do a Google search? Not overnight. Web 2.0 technologies are learning and improving, but human intelligence is still needed to define knowledge and information domains and how new artifacts or data fit into those domains. The Semantic Web, after all, will not yet nor possibly will it ever supersede Web 2.0. The Semantic Web is more accurately seen, most likely, as a subset of Web 2.0, a more rationally searchable portion of Web 2.0, but only as part of the Web 2.0 revolution, not a new revolution.
Trent Batson, Ph.D. has served as an English professor, director of academic computing, and has been an IT leader since the mid-1980s. He is currently Co-Lead for the Web2ePortfolio Initiatve (W2eP), a Senior Associate with the TLT Group, and Editor of Campus Technology's Web 2.0 e-newsletter. batsontr@mit.edu
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