Taking XML's measure |CNET.com
By David Becker, Staff Writer, CNET News.com
...Tim Bray and his colleagues in the World Wide Web Consortium had a very specific mission when they set out to define a new standard seven years ago. They needed a new format for Internet-connected systems to exchange data, a task being handled with increasing awkwardness by HyperText Markup Language...
Q: There's a lot of business interest in search now. Do you think companies would be better off focusing on user interface issues than algorithms?
A: Absolutely. There's no reason to expect that search is going to get that much better. I think where standards processes don't do well is in dealing with new technologies. The basic algorithms by which search is done have not improved much since about 1975. The only way to improve the situation is by enhancing search engines with more deterministic metadata, essentially adding knowledge management techniques that give you more information from which to draw connections. If you look at the victory of Google in the search engine business, it wasn't because they had better search techniques. It's because they deployed one key metadata value--how many pages are linked to this one--to enhance the relevancy of their results. The same concepts need to be applied to the enterprise...