Wednesday, August 02, 2006
The Second School of Semantic Science
Key-less Hash Glass Bead Games
On the limits of the OWL standard à [184]
Summary of the discussion up to this point à [186]
Push and Pull Information Flow
Statement of the Issue à [1]
Additional responses à [3]
First responses from John Sowa
Paul,
Email is a push system, in which the sender decides who should receive the information. The original WWW (and most current sites on it) are a pull system, in which the person who wants the information decides which site to visit.
> Pull requires that the pulling agent or person "know" the entire universe of relevant information...
Yes, but that problem has been addressed by the search engines. They're not perfect, and as Google has shown, even an incremental improvement is enough to enable a tiny company (in 1998) overtake the big boys (Altavista, Yahoo, etc.). There's a lot of room for improvement, but I would prefer a system that doesn't bother me until I ask it a question.
The major problem with pull technologies is SPAM. A few years ago, there was a lot of hype for pull as a solution to the problems of big businesses who wanted to get their advertising to the masses. However, the masses didn't like it. What looked like gold to the advertisers looked like SPAM to the people who received it.
As a result, pull technologies have not been widely accepted.
John
******************