In a recent interview Bitcoin core developer Jeff Garzik proffered a vision of the Blockchain development phase now underway, in which he described “a mesh network of cross-chain smart contracts” . To those familiar with the ideas of the Semantic Web and the global ecosystem of Linked Data these concepts should sound startlingly familiar. Initial Tremors The Semantic Web of Linked Data was supposed to transform the Web from a distributed file system into a distributed database system . But way back in 2006, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with the WWW conception, said that the vision of the Semantic Web was “largely unrealized”. For many this proclamation definitively sounded the death knell on an ambitious area of research. Google trends is an easy mechanism for confirming this dismal state of affairs, and it seems safe that the notion of the “Semantic Web” can now take up its mantle in the dustbin of history. But in our haste to disregard this formerly compelling avenue of exploration we might do well to remember Lazarus or Napoleon, or, for that matter, the once completely infeasible notion of digital money. “You’ll never step in the same river twice”, said Heraclitus, but some dead ideas have an uncanny way of them of coming back with a vengeance. Semantic Renaissance The dark ages describe an era of European history wherein much of the culture and civilization established under the Roman Empire was forgotten or disregarded until the epoch we know of as the Renaissance. The latest and greatest trend in Artificial Intelligence is Deep Learning which was responsible for the recent victory (or defeat, depending on your perspective) in the struggle of Machine vs. Man over the game of Go. The aficionados of “Deep Learning” are aware of the Dark Ages into which […]
