The Race Is On

There’s been a project called the Knowledge Web going on for some time now. It’s a project driven by the James Burke Institute. All very worthy, but I can’t help feeling it’s doomed to fail. It seems to me that it is trying to put in place a semantic web of connections between knowledge facts. And it is doing this by starting from ground zero, and building up.

 

This may turn out to be its failure.

 

There is already a large collection of knowledge facts. It’s called Wikipedia. And what if there were a way of placing a semantic web over this that would be easily navigable? Is that not the same as what the Knowledge Web claims to be trying to do? If it is, then the Wikipedia Explorer may be something that has just overtaken the Knowledge Web with one bound. Standing on the shoulders of giants is usually more efficient than building everything from scratch.