[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: RDF, the "semantic web",and the nadir of AI (was RE: Realisticpropos
One of the interesting things about this thread is that there seems to be an underlying assumption that the semantic Web is a well-defined idea and that it's implementation would work reliably. I've never thought of the term "semantic Web" as anything but marketing talk ("vision" if you want to use the latest in upper-echelon-corporate-speak). That is, it pointed people in the direction of a Web that had some chance of answering questions like, "Find me all reasonably priced pizza joints in a radius of 50 miles." (Sort of the same way the idea of a Dick Tracy communicator fuzzily guides my idea of where palmtops and cell phones are headed). It never occurred to me that such a Web would be significantly more relaible than the Web that exists today -- it would simply support a more targeted set of questions and links. Shortly before I started working with XML, I read a number of academic papers explaining how to extract data from the Web. These were invariably ridiculous, explaining systems where you wrote a special parser for a Web site not under your control but on which you knew there was something like a temperature or price you could extract. My immediate reaction was that the system didn't scale -- not even to one Web page. Then I looked at XML and thought, "This is the answer and it's pretty obvious, just not all that technically exciting." You throw out the AI bit and go for the human solution: ask everybody to cooperate and tell the world what kind of data is on their Web page. It might sound like a hard sell, but it really isn't, no more than getting people to post Web pages in the first place. I figure the semantic Web is just the next logical step: all it does is provide technology that allows people to build links and metadata to support the kind of queries that aren't possible today. It's no more reliable than the people that enter the data/metadata and, in the case of robot-generated information, not that reliable at all. But it does allow me to ask my pizza question, sift through the results, and get the answer I want, just like Alta Vista and Yahoo do today. As to a semantic Web reliable enough to automagically run business-to-business transactions -- such as sending an XML-based invoice to a supplier that you've never dealt with before without having to set anything up beforehand -- well, it's a nice idea but, sweet dreams. Aiming low, -- Ronald Bourret Programming, Writing, and Training XML, Databases, and Schemas http://www.rpbourret.com
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