On 17/5/09 10:06, Giovanni Tummarello wrote:
Hi Peter,
we all like to think "p2p", distributed, etc.
but the fact is that we love it too much, disregarding the basic
economic reasons that underly how the world (in fairness) works.
But lets put a constraint.
Lets imagine that we dont live forever and tha tthe time one should
work on a topic should be limited (e.g. 10years is a good span so i
began in 2002, 3 years left) dont you want to see some actual
advantange delivered to the end user within this timeframe? I do and
very strongly.
Google and Sindice are NOT closed infrastructures. They work on open
standards and anyone can implement something like this given the
proper economics and engineering.
Google falls tomorrow, we all use Yahoo Search (which works very well
IMO) or MSN .. etc.anything that's useful on the web will have an
economic value which will keep it alive.
Think of this same discussion like 15 years ago. Immagine that as
Search engines emerge, people would be discussing about "instead using
automatic methods for trackback links across websites becouse this
search engine thing wont really go nowhere"
how realistic and useful would these discussion have been in
hindsight? would these discussion have been the best thing to do to
bring the web "to its full potential"?
this is NOT to say however that the model is clear! Semantic Search
engines (that is an engine which really helps the semantic web) are
all but something that we know exactly how to do or how it should
behave. Lots of work to do really.
Anyway :-)
On my side i can just say that we are committed (e.g. i have base
http://sfi.ie funding for the next 4 years for example) to making life
simpler, spare a lot of hard work to many on the Semantic Web
therefore acting as a catalyst to, hopefully, very exciting apps to
come.
May I ask what you said you'd do in those 4 years, re Sindice? Is the
plan to build it out as a business so that it becomes self-supporting,
or saleable so that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc buy it up? Or that
it'll be in a stable-enough state after 4 years that the core works
relatively cheaply and new fun things can be added by more research funding?
Dan
