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Comment by ftwynn | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of these ideas in here are awesome... but I don't see how they're different from the basic semantic web concepts that have been tossed around for years now.

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Novelty man. People will always go after the new and shiny things, even if they're just redefinitions of old ideas.

I've been spreading the merits of the semantic web for years. People just ignore it. I've never been able to tell whether the idea is flawed, or if people simply don't get it.

I regularly go as far as to claim that the lack of semantic web is the cause of all the world's problems.

The idea is flawed.

Semantic Web expects people to do extra work, with no benefit. Create a benefit for those people, and you'll see it get done.

The benefit is the unifed interface.

Imagine Facebook being replaced by the semantic web.

For the people creating content, that's a problem, not a benefit.

Yes, for the readers, if there were enough structured content available, that would be a benefit. They aren't the ones that need convincing.

I think the difference is that the times potentially has the ability to execute. Semantic web was a cool idea but failed to catch on even with all the grassroots efforts. NYT already has tons of content with tons of metadata and they have the readership. Maybe they can pull it off.

I don't think they can put it into production easily. They would have to rework their entire site, their entire workflow, and the way their journalists work. What they are describing also doesn't work well on existing articles, because those articles, which they have some meta data, are not in a format that works well as a database. For example, each article has a lot of repetition with earlier articles. They say that it would require a lot of manpower. We solve this issue by crowdsourcing the events and their meta data.

The article is published by the same group that's building tools to help with this exact problem. [1]

[1] http://nytlabs.com/projects/editor.html

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