I decided to do this a month ago tonight. I was getting a reckless drive home along Sanibel streets to the Sundial, just coming from a talk-filled dinner with a dozen or so DERI folk, worried I wouldn't have enough time to sleep and pack before returning to Pennsylvania the next morning, when I thought of it: Big Fractal Tangle would be the name of a blog. Earlier that day, we'd all seen the Tim Berners-Lee keynote speech at the end of the five-day ISWC 2003, during which he said the phrase as an aside while describing the Semantic Web....

A day before the conference started, I was sitting in the whirlpool at the Sundial reading Practical RDF by Shelley Powers with a highlighter. I was pretty focused on the book, so I didn't notice the four people that joined me in the whirlpool while I read. I looked up after a while and began being more friendly ... they were all Americans, and all on vacation. After we talked for a while, the man across from me asked, "What's the twenty second rundown on RDF." Apparently he had worked in IT before he retired, and geniunely wanted to know....

Many of the talks I had in Sanibel were about our current social problems: what they are, why they persist, what can be done. I loved having so many Europeans to talk with, since I find them to be more open, more personal, more informed about world events than many Americans, particularly in professional settings. It might seem odd to have a whole lotta philosophizing going on at a technical conference, but I was thrilled by it. As technologists, we have more power to change things than often we realize. With something as pervasive and as influential as the Semantic...

Borislov Popov wrote in response: "As all tools in the world, the Sem Web will be just a tool ... It will be employed by people, so the people are the ones to change; because the tools are just artificial limbs for us --- they fulfill our intentions ... They will help if our intention develops, as does the internet in some cases and radio'n tv in others." Well said, and history agrees with him. With each technological advance, there's always a few optimists like me shouting hope from the rooftops, who then later agree that their world-changing advance is...

Putting aside for a moment all this pie-in-the-sky, we-are-the-world stuff, let's switch to more immediate concerns. We were warned by our keynote at the conference against overhyping our efforts, and he's right. The more we reflect and rhapsodize about our vision, the more we'll tune out the press, and thereby the decision makers. Better to sneak up on them ... we should underpromise and overdeliver. But there's a bigger reason to shut up about it: I think in the short run the Semantic Web is more likely to fail than succeed. I went down to Sanibel to see if "it's...

Years ago, at my father's old ad agency, I took over in the accounting department after they'd let a woman go who'd been doing the books. For a month I struggled with her filing system, rummaging in the cabinets for ten minutes each time I wanted something. Bills from the same health insurance company would sometimes appear in "Insurance", and sometimes under the company's name, and sometimes under "Benefits." I finally gave up and took a week to completely reorganize everything. The ability to organize is a teachable skill, though it's often seen as a personality trait we've either got...

The idea for my company's current project began in January 1999 while I was trying to teach my mom, Rosemary, how to email photos taken with her new Kodak digital camera. The software that came with it was called PictureEasy, and was pretty easy. Of the two dozen photo programs I've used since, it was probably the best for her, but it still had some snags that tripped her up from time to time. Over the next few years, whenever we went to visit her in Bonita Springs, Florida (half an hour from Sanibel), I'd download a bunch of new...

"In the long run [people] hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high." (Thoreau) Mr. Shirky's article The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview is a real piece of work. I don't agree with any of it, but I'm still glad he wrote it. Nothing motivates me more than baseless partisan bluster, and while I know he's just muddying the waters to appear deep, I've decided to use his article, and him, to make a larger point. This is the promise of the Semantic Web -- it will improve all...