Semantic Technology Conference - 1
I’m in San Jose at the Semantic Technology
Conference. Jim Hendler and Ora Lassila’s
keynote address this morning: reviewing five years of progress on the semantic
web. Not much to disagree with. One of Ora’s closing slides mentioned lack of
progress in agents (see picture).
It’s a little hard to read, but the last line is “little progress on agents”.
The commentary from Jim and Ora was fairly muted about agents, even though they
claimed (particularly Ora) that having agents act on the user’s behalf was one
of their key motivations originally. My view: a lot of the rhetoric about where
we really want to go with the semantic web depends on a representation of
intention, and agents are exactly the expression of intention in computational
form.