It
seems to me, that this what RDF enables one to check, at least,
in
the same sense that one can find out if two or more sources made
the
same assertion. What it does not check is
superstition. If many
the
experts believe that spontaneous generation is an accepted fact,
and
therefore, most of the metadata generated asserts that, can RDF
find
that falsehood? I don't think so unless related facts in a
separate
set
of assertions don't jibe.
So
we may be biased, but without correlations among different classes
of
measured events, how can we tell?
T here's no
disputing that if there is no information available that falls outside of the
superstitious class, then we'll continue with the spontaneous maggot
assumption. But there is potential for reasoning that can take us outside
- assert the maggotty meat fact, negate the spontaneous generation fact and
see what falls through the net. I do suspect it will be a good while
before we see anything useful outside of academia, but the potential's
there. I've lost the ref again, but there's also the work
that discovered some medical link using data mining techniques. Semweb
technologies should make this kind of thing a whole lot
easier.
In the nearer term, having tools that can enable more
structured discussion (such as the ClaiMaker app) may make it possible
for current, largely human processes to be accelerated, so things
like scientific advances can happen more rapidly. The web has enabled an awful
lot more people to have an extremely broad range of material that
was previously hard to come by, the semweb should make it easier to find and
work with. It's rather prosaic, but my
inability to quote the medical link piece of work is a perfect example of a
problem that decent RDF-based indexing could solve.
One other bit of bluish sky follows
from noting that information from sensors in the real world can be fed
directly in to the web - nothing remarkable about that. But the data can
be immediately available for analysis alongside the huge corpus that is
the web - hypotheses can be checked in real time, as long as the data and
those hypotheses are expressed in a machine-understandable fashion. Let's get
the machines doing the work for a change.
Cheers,
Danny.
