Isn’t it semantic?: An interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. There are some interesting comments on the semantic web in this interview.
In physics, to take the behaviour of gases as an example, you visualize them as billiard balls, model the rules they follow and then transpose that to a larger scale to account for the effects of temperature and pressure – so physicists analyze systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.
So we could say we want the Web to reflect a vision of the world where everything is done democratically, where we have an informed electorate and accountable officials. To do that we get computers to talk with each other in such a way as to promote that ideal.
