Alternatives to the Semantic Web?

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Phil Jones: Alternatives to the Semantic Web?, Platform Wars October 24, 2005

What is the alternative to the semantic web? How about this: "I'll suggest the alternative to the SemWeb is the SynWeb, a web which doesn't need 'key identifiers'. A world with lots of online data, marked up with syntactic cues which make it easy to parse (eg. good old fashioned XML, or Markdown or YAML); more powerful tools and libraries for parsing and querying data with these formats; plus lots of programs which scoop up the data and combine them in interesting ways". More...