Animals that Belong to the Emperor: Failing universal classification schemes from Aristotle to the Semantic Web - Florian Cramer

The weapon with which state-subsidized European search technology projects allegedly intend to beat Google is semantic information processing: pattern recognition in media file in the French Quaero project, Semantic Web technology in Theseus, its German off-spring. Originally, Quaero was a French-German collaboration, funded by both governments, until the German Theseus project split off from Quaero to pursue its own vision of future Web search. This vision is twofold, involving a number of classic holy grails of computer science: to provide search on the basis of Semantic Web meta tags, to have software recognize the contents of web pages in order to automatically apply those tags.