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RE: WSIO vs. Semantic Web

• To: 'Joshua Allen' <joshuaa@m...>, Paul Prescod <paul@p...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: WSIO vs. Semantic Web
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 13:08:46 -0600

That was my conclusion too, last year.  It is why 
Gruber coined the concept "ontological commitment" 
and we refer to the occasional test of commitment. 
Ontological communities are a fact of life and 
in fact, one way to deduce that some person or 
thing is a member of a reference group is to 
check the vocabulary usage.  No news there, but 
of consequence to people who make secondary 
inferences for behavioral systems.  There are 
governance issues which are now being dimly 
understood as America rushes to provide 
profiling systems with global reach.

In my article in Markup Languages (2-4), I concluded:

"In contrast to other descriptions of web systems 
as services, a semantic web is not simply a web of 
discovery of resources.  With its dependence on 
ontology as the means, a semantic web is a web of 
agreement of means for choices.  While its goal is 
to enable agents to process descriptions and offer 
choices, it can become a means to discard any message 
considered by a dominant community to be irrelevant 
or noisy.  Agents filter opinion, winnow classifications, 
and ultimately are a means of stratification of information 
and sources of information.  In essence, the concept 
of the right to choose the means to choose is becoming 
the dominant issue of the next generation of web evolution."

Note that web services (UDDI) also depend on ontologies. 
The devil is in the details and depth, but ultimately 
on the freedom of the described to commit to the description.  
As long as John Cowan assents to the description on a web page 
he controls, the system works just fine as a means of 
harvesting values by which he can be identified.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Joshua Allen [mailto:joshuaa@m...]

Balkanization is more of a danger in semantic web, in my opinion, since
there is a lot more room for individual metadata communities to form and
thrive before they end up having to interoperate.  And it is harder for
a few large vendors to ever have significant enough control over all of
the metadata publishing and consumption pieces to be able to force some
level of sameness from the start.  So I think semantic web will require
*more* vigilance and work than RPC to maintain openness.

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