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Re: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathre

• To: Dare Obasanjo <dareo@m...>
• Subject: Re: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathread thing)
• From: Mark Baker <distobj@a...>
• Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 14:59:20 -0400
• Cc: XML Developers List <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <830178CE7378FC40BC6F1DDADCFDD1D102766E97@R...>
• References: <830178CE7378FC40BC6F1DDADCFDD1D102766E97@R...>
• User-agent: Mutt/1.3.28i

On Mon, Jun 14, 2004 at 08:12:05AM -0700, Dare Obasanjo wrote:
> For this to work (a) every description of a person must use the same data model

What do you mean by "data model" that RDF doesn't already provide?

> & (b) there needs to exist a mapping from your applications data model to that of the unknown schema available somewhere. This seems fairly optimistic to me and highly unlikely in the geenral case in practice. 

I don't see the need for optimism.  This is an enabling technology meant
to handle cases such as;

a) you want to reuse an existing ontology verbatim
b) you want to reuse an existing ontology and extend it with your
own ontology
c) you have an existing ontology that you want to map to a well known
one
d) you want to develop a completely proprietary ontology and provide no
mapping
e) you want to develop a proprietary ontology but provide a mapping,
possibly partial
(... and certainly others I haven't thought of)

The Semantic Web - vision or technologies - doesn't depend on these
mappings existing since it has to (and does) support case d).  Of
course, the more instances of case d) out there, the fewer cases of
open, ad-hoc integration we'll see, but that has little to do with the
technology, and everything to do with market forces.

Mark.
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca

• References:
  • RE: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathread thing)
    • From: "Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@m...>

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