There’s been a great deal of discussion regarding the wide spread adoption of Semantic web standards now that Google, Yahoo and Bing have admitted their algorithmic adjustments to RDF and microformats.   What’s equally interesting to note is as the standards spread like wildfire the number of  voices  that are raised in alarm at the sinister implications of  smart algorithms being able to interpret contextual meta data in the same manner as a human reader and deliver more relevant results for SE queries.

Justin Leavesley goes as far as to invoke Wittgenstein’s  Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in his efforts to dispute the notion of a contextual mark up of enhanced data being used to identify concepts on the web  with Unique Resource Identifiers (as opposed to Unique Resource Locations).  In spite of Wittgenstein himself refuting many of the tracts assumptions in his later work, the core of the arguments shared by many at the It’s Just Semantics FriendFeed forum appears to pick up the assertion that Semantic mark up  is dangerous because it establishes set rules for the meaning of data components as they are processed by algorithms.

Continues @ http://oxfordseo.com/blog/?p=496

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