"He (Tim Berners-Lee)expressed the belief that Semantic Web technology will advance the information revolution he began with the World Wide Web, changing everything from how users set up their online address books to how they pay their taxes."
The problem with the semantic web is that radical meaning variance is alive and well. As a friend who works in GIS for geology says, "If I send a team of geologists out to map a region, when I put their data together I can tell who mapped where but not what anyone mapped."
There are ways in carefully controlled situations (like geological mapping) to deal with this, but in the uncontrolled wilds of the web we don't have any very good idea of how to handle it. Published ontologies are a hopeful attempt to get people to agree, but how they are interpreted by different individuals will still vary a great deal, because it always involves mapping the individual's ontologies (plural) onto the published document and that will rarely happen cleanly.
To take a likely quite common example: a published ontology may put A and B in the same genus, whereas you or I might give each one a different genus, based on our understanding of the world. You see this a lot when crossing between fields, as a pure physicist will often have a quite different set of abstract categories than an applied physicist, an engineer, or a mathematician, much less a geologist or biologist. And individuals within fields vary a great deal as well. So what you end up with, while better than nothing, is still some kind of weird and disjoint intersection between the published ontology and the personal ontologies of all the people who use it.
Automated tools for processing documents and inferring their semantic categories may help enough for the semantic web to be useful, but it'll take a concerted effort to ensure that such tools produce vaguely similar results, and we aren't there yet by a long shot. And then there's the problem of deliberate gaming.
As such, I don't think the semantic web is "under-rated" so much as it is still, after almost 20 years, in the early days of development work on a very hard problem.
I think the really hard problems are almost unsolvable so waiting for them to be fixed before putting effort into this area doesn't seem wise.
In general we need a common mechanism to be able to make simple factual assertions in a web page or when describing a data flow.
The other very significant problem is that learning the technologies around rdf/owl/sparql is a lot of work and to be honest about it, most developers refuse to even learn sql properly.
I'm hopeful google's slow but steady focus on web page/email markup(for google now) will get the momentum behind solving some of the simple problems that it's insane we still have (things like, is there an address that describes this businesses location somewhere on this web page?).
Not 100% on topic, I find Cory Doctorow's essay "Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia"[1] addresses certain shortcomings of his vision quite well.
Death due to honeybees mutated with Box Jellyfish venom.
"the venom causes cells to become porous enough to allow potassium leakage, causing hyperkalemia which can lead to cardiovascular collapse and death as quickly as within two to five minutes"
So much negativity on this comment. It's a statement. This is the generation of tl;dr. SAT scores are down, IQs are down since the Victorian age by 10 points. What percentage of the population would read the entirety of that article, let alone a single book 100 times? That comment is both sarcastic and ironic. Perfect.
Went to purchase $100 worth of Bitcoin back in the day at $0.03 ea. CC didn't go through. Thought I would try again the next morning with a different card. After sleeping on it, decided it was probably a waste of $100.
This happened to me about a month after I moved to Phoenix.
I paid less than fifty bucks to get my car out of the impound. My insurance company cut me a check for $800 to fix the cosmetic damage, which I pocketed.
"Studies show that though many people participate in gambling as a form of recreation or even as a means to gain an income, gambling, like any behavior which involves variation in brain chemistry, can become a psychologically addictive and harmful behavior in some people" Wikipedia
What next? Giving the homeless bitcoins for their iphones?
Besides the Jubilee, there was a 'release' every 7 years, where 'every creditor that lends unto his neighbour shall release it'.
In ancient Israel, real estate was forbidden to be permanently 'sold'. You could lease it out for 50 years, but at the Jubilee, it would return back to the family.
Ok then, tell me where the evolutionary pressure came from for brains to consider and act upon things like burials, math, surgery, and brain surgery in particular.
Because it thinks. It takes in information and performs an analysis on that data. Surely over the time it would take to evolve, my brain thinks that it should understand that more than anything?
It understands how every other organ works in explicit detail at the the molecular level.
The only thing my brain can imagine, is that my consciousness is disconnected somewhat from my brain. It's as though my consciousness is inside a machine that it barely understands the workings thereof. Like a dog riding in a car.
1) Individual brains don't evolve, evolution happens to the gene blueprint by which embryos make brains, and it is fixed before the new brain has had a single thought;
2) Your brain definitely doesn't understand how every other organ works in explicit detail; controlling organs only requires being part of a good enough feedback loop to have the organ mostly function; your brain understands your heart "at the molecular level" about as much fruitflies do.
Do you not see the hypocrisy in your comment? Referring to a group of people as "rubbish" and "better off without this sort"? Of course, only a white person can be 'truly' racist. Now where is that link to the Indian diplomat oppressing their servant. Ah yeah, there it is.
The semantic web is underrated.
http://goo.gl/YCc1Ly