"I think the answer is to put the tools for constructing data formats
into the hands of users. We've been going about it all wrong, coming up
with straight-jackets for users, and expecting them to conform to some
set of rules that make no sense about how the characters should be
encoded, when it's ideas and relationships to other ideas that we want
to make it easy for them to express. In other words, we don't
know how to capture this data that we want so much, so create a tool
for expressing data that at least some people can use, and let them use
it, and let them make it public, and then see what kind of crawlers
people write, and then learn, and iterate, and try again and again
until we're closer to having the information we want at our fingertips,
to quote another visionary from another time."
I'm not sure I see how OPML becomes the enabler of this vision, but
it's a worthy vision nonetheless. I really like the idea that we
begin to express ourselves in terms of data and that the machines then
learn to interact with us based on that expression. Dave, are you
suggesting that data is a new human language?Trackbacks:
TrackBack URL:
http://www.mattmcalister.com/blog/_trackback/1122553