(Up to: Technology Vs Evolution )

The world is full of problems to be solved. And it so happens, thanks to the connected nature of modern humanity, that there are bound to be at least N people working on solutions to each problem at the same time. On average, these solutions probably take roughly the same time to "dispense", leaving the world with a constant trail of branching, plausibly-similar-but-subtly-incompatible methodologies to achieve the same thing.

Take, for instance, the overlap between proposed wiki-metadata-format MachineCodeBlocks and FOAF. Both are solving subtly different problems, and both have the possibilty of storing data that overlaps with the other.

The real semantic web will emerge, I think, as a superlayer above all of this. There's no way to stop people trying to solve problems - that would be stupid - so we must accept that this level of incompatibility will always exist, if we are to find and build upon the most efficient solution to a particular problem. However, extracting the meaning from these - rather than embedding the meaning in a specific format - is key to semanticism.

Tagging has emerged as a KISS approach to this, but remains relatively simple - too simple for more complex inference. It also bears the problem itself though, in the form of "related tags", such as "games" and "gaming" - this equivalence could be inferred. (but n.b. games obviously != gaming. Only at some granularity do the two terms equate. This implies there must either be a selectable scope, or equivalence weighting.)