Clinamen

Red Herring's Tomio Geron explores semantic technology as the "next thing" and a challenge to Google:

Developers of next generation search engines say their technology will “understand” the language within those queries—much more precisely than Internet giant Google’s technology.

These next generation search engines will, apparently, interpret your search question. This will mean searching the Web in a new way, and people developing these technologies are hoping to retrain Web users:

Barney Pell, CEO of PowerSet, conceded that semantic search engines must convince people to change their search behavior. But web surfers have been trained to use keywords on Google, even though that is not the way people think. So that behavior can change, he argued.

I'm extremely skeptical of technologies that attempt to shape behavior. It seems to me that the best technologies are those that adapt to user behavior. Yes, designers shape an environment (much like an architect does), but they do not (and cannot) dictate behavior. Users use stuff in weird ways. This is called innovation. I'm reminded of Lawrence Lessig's discussions of "dumb networks." He uses the U.S. constitution and the Internet as two examples of dumb networks that allow for flexibility. The minute you start building intelligence into the network, you introduce bottlenecks. This is what Net Neutrality is all about. Currently, Web servers treat all packets of information the same, and this means that all of the innovation happens at the end points of the network. If you change this, you limit what people can do on the Web.

As I spoke to my roommate about semantic technologies, he told me that Central Park was originally developed to in the 19th Century as a way to save the "depraved" working class. So, what did the working class do? They started playing baseball in the park, and this pissed off the park's designers to no end. My roommate explain this example and then described such philosophies of design as "hubris."

This is what I think we've got with semantic technologies: hubris. You can't make people use your design exactly the way you envisioned it. And even if you could, you'd be cutting out all of the myriad ways in which a technology/design could appropriated and reappropriated.