Re: <nettime> Critique of the "Semantic Web"

[Reto Bachmann-Gmür <reto@gmuer.ch>]

Florian Cramer wrote:

> ...
>
>    The Semantic Web promises to overcome folksonomies with one, unified
>    and standardized keyword tagging system that can applied to anything.

This is the wrong assumption that makes the further critique of the
Semantic Web missing the point. The semantic web is not about building
one big upper-ontology but about supporting many (usually very small)
ontologies. The domains of those ontologies may overlap or not. A user
of semantic web technology may use or dismiss any of these ontologies.
Similarly just because the system allows to express something like
(rel:muslim rdfs:subclassOf cia:potentialTerrorist) and put this
assertion on the web doesn't make the assertion a global truth. Indeed
the explicitness of the ontological assumptions provides a better bases
for a socially decentralized systems [1].

Cheers,
Reto


1. See my post on "Reputation Web":
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0707/msg00037.html


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