The Semantic Graph and other New New Things

Uh Oh...Sir Tim Berners Lee has (I think) just re-jigged the Semantic Web to be the embodiment of the Social Graph.

I must admit to being a bit nonplussed...maybe its just us, but while they both run on a connected Network (Why, oh why, do we have to now use the word Graph for a Network these days?) it seemed to me that the Semantic Web was much more of a taxonomy play, around making the edge data interchangeable and easily parsable, than being an analysis of the interactions of the network connections themselves.

I think what he is getting at is to make the structure of all and any User Data - the stuff you put into your Social Net profile - the same, so it is readable and transferable wherever you have it located, and then functions that make use of it and work on top of it can be standardised - sort of what Google is trying to do but a de Jure, rather than de Facto standard. This would abviously make it much easier to hit the whole net with the maths of social network analysis. In that respect the GGG is a Special Case of the Semantic Web - a vertical application - and that makes sense, as our analysis is that the General Case of the Semantic Web is horrendously complex to execute.

We will look at it in more detail, but I must admit to having the same initial reaction Nick Carr has had:

Well, it looks like there'll be no escaping the "social graph" term. World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, in a blog post last evening, not only bestowed his blessing on the social graph but elevated it to the capitalized Social Graph, a sign that we have a New Paradigm on our hands.

The Unified Theory of Networking no less