22 July 2009 View Comments

Semantic Discussion Heats Up; Critics Call Up Wittgenstein

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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View Comments to “Semantic Discussion Heats Up; Critics Call Up Wittgenstein”

  1. Serial Entreprenuer 23 July 2009 at 2:00 am #

    " 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."

    It's frightening how inaccurate this comment is…scary actually. How is it that people have no fear of making authoritative statements that are so embarrassingly wrong!


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