Just saw some news on Sir Tim Berners-Lee making the case against “closed web solutions” like Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Apple. Basically these companies take your data and use it for your and their own purposes. As opposed to the W3C‘s semantic web ideal of having all data available for all to use as needed. Of course, this is where the idealistic “semantic web” was always doomed: data and information has value and therefore is not going to be made freely available, especially where the value of the collecting application is in the use of said data (e.g. Facebook). On the other hand there is much to agree with in this essay – it should be compulsory reading for politicians considering meddling with the internet.
Meanwhile, the value of “semantics” and “web” as separate entities continue to be recognised by most of us. And on the former topic, I see the CallForPapers covering “realtime and continuous semantics”, “rules”, “reasoning and inference” and so forth is up on the 2011 Semantic Technology Conference site. I wonder if organisor Tony Shaw will get some “Semantic CEP” submissions – whether from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or anyone else…
