Semantic Web Speculations
Each week, I write a post on topics related to Social and Semantic Web. The content for now have included examples from websites and applications. In this post though, I want just to brainstorm on what the future may bring to us with respect to semantic web. How our thinking patterns, living style and social behaviours would possibly be affected.
Semantic tools aim to structure a certain data and make it available to user via search algorithms, specialised suggestions, natural linguistic connectivity, etc. These allow users to be apt to spend more quality time on a system and also have better connections between concepts of that specific system. Relevant data has more accessibility and meaning at the end. However, we can assume strong semantic tools will hold some human characteristics of thinking. Reaching to information has been changed quite dramatically from printed manuscripts to Google age. Being knowledgeable less involves memorizing but more the ability to find an information and ability to connect information in a map-like pattern. However, with semantic tools become more prevalent and a primary mode of reaching information changes, this is open to transform.
New way of being knowledgable in the era of semantic web does not necessarily include having the ability to reach an information. Because, in its ontological characteristics, semantic web makes it easy and systematic that finding an information is more of an encounter than a pursuit. Similarly, connecting information in a schematic way is more prevalent with semantic tools than ever before. With linked data systems, you can find many visualised maps of connections about specific information. Although you cannot find all information in this format yet, it will be more visible and maybe the most preferred way of exposing people to knowledge. It will be more common than any time that relations between data points will have more visibility and access. When something is more accessible, it brings meta-abilities to play with them. It will probably be the case and how people use these systems will be the criteria. However, we know from history of technology that innovations are faster and stronger(money wise) in commercial industries than education, culture or art. Semantic tools are already being used by businesses to create addictive web systems. These will evolve as knowledge through semantic web evolves and probably commercial ones will anyway be a stakeholder and determine vast majority of people’s way of using internet and its applications.
Semantic tools have already started to be used in shopping websites, dating applications, social media platforms, etc. The motive behind this trend obviously is not to transform intellectuality of modern generations but to have masses of people who wants to buy more than they want to sell. Fast and creepy flow of suggestions in every tab you open in your browser, seeing a lifestyle that is sunk in products in your social media and updating your needs each time you notice you lack a product surely affects today’s humans’ daily life. The definition of being knowledgable might change in the way that I described in the previous paragraph but this will not make more people to seek to be knowledgable. Because web is dominated by industries and they shape users’ patterns of using internet and this domination becomes stronger as more powerful algorithms and graphical processors are being used.
In the semantic era, knowledge will be accessible and more structured than ever before but not visible due to the domination of industries and addictiveness they work hard on. I am on the thin line of having an optimist view or a dystopian one. What do you think?
