Oliver_Henniges - 11:00 am on Jul 22, 2006 (gmt 0)

> It is a wonderful utopian dream

Yes, exactly. The origins of this dream date back to Marvin Minsky's prophecies on AI, if I remember correctly. And in contrast to Kennedy's dream (also dreamt in the early sixties) of sending a man to the moon, the rocket-science of consistantly understanding meaning has not even left the ground, because it is tied by a Moebius-ribbon. Even fourty years later I am still waiting for a machine to drive my #*$!in' car, so that I can take my hands off the wheel and continue to hack my keyboard.

Sorry, but I am a bit conservative and thus insist on quite strict definitions of "semantics." Perhaps I might accept visions of a "semiotic" web...

> linked databases from diverse sources.

There are a number of laws over here, which really do forbid that. I have no idea how long these laws will persist, but they will definitely slower progress tremedously.

Any digital signature or other prove of trust will always be a challenge to the hacker community in the first place.

The most fascinating aspect of the web is its "openness."

A funny coincidence that I just finished a little book with essays from Popper. Not "the open society and its enemies", though that would fit quite well. I guess he'd say: there is no absolute truth nor trust nor meaning. All we have is our imperfect theories, hypotheses, databases and search-algos. Let's continue to improve these.