[Expertfinder-dev] big fractal tangle: Timothy Falconer blog post from dec '03

[Dan Brickley]

This seems relevant, in terms of high-level vision:

In http://bigfractaltangle.com/angela/

 From an imaginary conversation...

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Timothy: I'm convinced it can, particularly given the ideas in the 
prospectus you gave me. Your startup company essentially wants to create 
a worldwide technical talent search system, like Monster.com, only 
decentralized. I showed you FOAF yesterday so you could see what this 
might look like.

Angela: So our startup could use FOAF?

Timothy: They could build on it, but the prospectus indicates they'd 
rather make their own specialized metadata vocabulary, or "ontology." 
It's actually not very difficult to make the ontology, or even the 
system that uses it. The tricky part, the risky part, is convincing lots 
of people to annotate their resumes using the new ontology. Until then, 
they'll just have some nice useless software and no customers.

Angela: So they gotta get buy-in before it'll take off. This sounds like 
the bad press we've been reading, that the Semantic Web's a nice idea, 
but people won't take to it, like the metric system in America.

Timothy: That's certainly the elephant in the middle of the room, but I 
think you'll have a much easier time achieving buy-in because you're 
targeting a technical audience. Software and web developers are more 
likely to mark up their resumes with RDF. Given our still struggling 
technical economy, I think they'll also be motatived to do it, 
particularly once they see it can give them an edge in finding work.

Angela: What about the real customers, the companies paying to use the 
search system. You run a software company. Would you pay for it?

Timothy: Absolutely. I'd love to use a system like this. With it, I'd be 
able to search for developers who have five or more years of Java 
experience, who understand object modeling, and design patterns, and 
refactoring, who have experience with particular technologies like EJB 
or Swing, who have a reasonable hourly rate, and who have experience 
working on their own. Being able to do a search like this would make my 
life much easier.

Angela: But how could you be sure they weren't lying about their 
experience? What's that thing you say, "Garbage In, Garbage Out"?

Timothy: Well, there's an important piece of the Semantic Web puzzle 
that addresses that issue, the so-called "web of trust." The idea is 
that people can vouch for the accuracy of other people's metadata. This 
"trust" can be encoded in the system in a secure fashion, which means 
you can then do searches that only bring up trustworthy results.

Angela: But can't the vouching people lie too?

Timothy: They could, but it wouldn't matter. The measure of trust could 
be grounded by someone I already knew and trusted. Just like in real 
life, if I trust someone, who trusts someone, who trusts someone, I'm 
more likely to find a good worker. It's the same as using personal 
recommendations, but it's systematized, so it saves time. I think it's a 
great idea.

Angela: Okay, well you've given us a lot to think about. Thanks again 
for your advice, and your patience. I'll let you know if we decide to 
invest in this Semantic Web startup.

Timothy: It was my pleasure. Call anytime. Good luck!

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