Cart
|
[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: local, global (was various ontology, RDF, topic maps)
 Take a look at the dot.com fallout. People will believe and invest and will lose their shirts and others will take their shirts and build big pink houses on the hillsides outside San Jose with them. When HTML said SGML was evil, some took that to heart. When others said HyTime was evil, some took that to heart. Both times, the sayers were wrong. It took experience and a lot of hard work for people to find the baby in the bathwater, but they have and there are remarkably good systems coming out as a result that have little in common with the original HTMLOverAll systems. They look like... SGML + hypermedia circa 1989 with better graphics. So far so good. That is what we are doing here with the semantic web. I started out with the "the semantic web is a crock" position knowing full well that the underlying tech and concepts do work in a limited fashion because, being an old guy now, I was a young turk when case grammars, AI, expert systems and all that were discussed last time. They do work, in a limited fashion. But I took the very pessimistic approach precisely because of the "idealistic" view you talk about. The WWW and the W3C hyped a lot of people's lifesaving's into other pockets. Now we are more cautious about such visions, but we must also look at the tech itself and ask what good we can do with it. As others have mentioned, some of the search engines are a LOT better these days. When I sit with my son to do a book report on the Enola Gay and type that in, I don't see nearly as many superstitious unwanted hits as we once did. That's progress. What we are doing IS trying to understand how local ontologies (all markets are buyer's markets regardless of supply and demand) can interoperate. There are some very hard social problems as well as technical problems. We aren't shying away from those in this forum. We may not solve them, but we acknowledge them and try to advise others about them. An ontology is an opinion of sorts. As such, regard the source, but moreover, observe and test the source, forgive, but don't forget. The rest is Tit for Tat. To be sure, what the system doesn't see, doesn't exist in that system. We have to be mindful of that. ANY hypermedia system can make information disappear by ignoring an address, can make any concept appear to be the work of another by frequency of attribution, can alter the course of events by refusing to acknowledge a submission. All true and precisely why we use these email lists so assiduously to proof the visions of those with big podiums. We build that foundation of agreement by open debate on the issues, begging those that have other work to do to please ignore these posts until they need the information for their work. A universal semantic is a golem. We not only won't build it, we don't know how to build it. The aleph is not ours to mount and mud just doesn't cohere in the rain of continuous hits on a server. :-) Len http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -----Original Message----- From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@s...] I find it remarkable that people talk about 'agreement' as if it weren't a radical concept in itself, and that they actually seem to believe that maintaining large sets of agreements about meaning is both possible and beneficial. I'm heartened by discussion of the contingencies involved in such projects, but still find the foundations far less solid than large groups of people seem to believe. 
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! 
Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|
|||||||||
