Semantic Web aphorisms

from the much-discussed Semantic Web essay
In order for the Semantic web to work, you would need “a world where language is merely math done with words”
“Any attempt at a global ontology is doomed to fail, because meta-data describes a worldview. ”
David Weinberger
I don’t think Clay is arguing that all metadata is bad. Rather, he’s saying that it doesn’t scale. Yes, the insurance industry might be able to construct a taxonomy that works for it, but the Semantic Web goes beyond the local. It talks about how local taxonomies can automagically knit themselves together. The problem with the Semantic Web is, from my point of view, that it can’t scale because taxonomies are tools, not descriptions, and thus don’t knit real well.
Shelley, from Sam Ruby’s comments
There is a big difference between deliberate metadata, and accidental metadata, and if semantic web relied purely on accidental metadata, then we have it — it is called Google.