Briefs

Mor Naaman, a research scientist with Yahoo Research Berkeley, stood in front of a roomful of semantic Web researchers and declared that the semantic Web is dead. This happened last week at the International World Wide Web Conference in Alberta, Canada, as Naaman describes on the Yahoo Research Berkeley blog.

While Naaman, a semantic Web researcher himself, was admittedly using some hyperbole in his statement, he maintains that "the grand vision of 'A Semantic Web' will not be achieved," mostly because users cannot be expected to annotate media with complex labels, as a researcher would, but can only be expected to use simple tags. In addition, developers should be expected to pass over complicated standards in favor of simpler ones, like RSS, microformats, and Flickr machine tags.

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