ReadWriteWeb has an intriguing guest post by Alisa Leonard-Hansen on the the idea of the Pragmatic Web. She takes a sanguine look at the Semantic Web and the fact that it is going to take time to build the machines and networking to fully mine the contextual information that will appear.
She explores the way that social relationships can be mined re-presented by individuals and companies to find the context for the media companies.
There’s something about the focus on the use of identity data by Facebook and the fact that it is only of use if it is immediate that concerns me. I’m more interested in literary data and how to work with this in ‘pragmatic’ ways and I cannot see a place for my voice as these technologies, and their underlying agendas, appeared to be guided by the media companies or at least most vociferously guided by them. Certainly in terms of advertising, making older data ‘pragmatic’ is a loser but in the long term, I think that there is a value to it and creating linked data sets.
Now that some personal projects have come to a temporary end, or at least a needed hiatus before the next version, I’ve got a little more time to explore this and to do more work on Dickens.