[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] On frank discussions of RDF, AI, "The Semantic Web", OLAP, etc.
> Thanks for entering the thread. Much appreciated. I don't mean to disappoint, and if it looks as if I can't defend my POV there's not much I can do about it, but I really don't have the time right now for lengthy debate on these topics on this list. I got through XML-DEV by mass-deleting posts on W3C policy and skimmed the RDF thread out of interest. Of course I came to attention when I saw my name. My main purpose for posting was to point out that my article is probably a pretty poor stand-in for W3C explanation of "semantic web". I took great pains in my article to mention that we use RDF in closed space alone, where we control URIs, data-streams, and process. At the end of the article I explicitly state that we have not tested 4RDF in anything that could be called an open Web situation (i.e. widely-distributed resources by arbitrary authors in ad hoc location and with ad hoc content structure). Maybe I should have said that RDF itself has not really been tested in that space, but I'm not sure that is true, and it wasn't the aim of the article to give a general judgment of RDF. You ask what RDF lends us that existing relational processing doesn't. I already mentioned that it is the extensibility and the flexibility accorded by less rigorous structure. In the sort of applications we build, these things do save the clients time and money. Of course, you talk about how "proven" OLAP and other technologies are. This is a red flag indicating a nasty time sink to my reading. No one has the objective tools to debunk the assertion that relational tools work very well. This is because they have been so successful in the marketplace that there is no control case (that I know of) to indicate that, as I believe, other technologies could have had the same benefit at hundreds of times less the cost. But I'm drifting into the discussion I can't afford. I do hope that I'll be better able to contribute in the near future, and I have a feeling that some of our up-coming announcements will result in some imperative to do so. The point I should take care to make is this: there is rarely magic in technology itself. The magic comes from developers. You may like Java and I like Python, and we can beat each other up over it, but in the end, good developers will write good apps regardless of the tools, and bad developers will continue to sink dot-coms. The same goes for RDF. Fourthought has built decision-support and content integration systems that cost far less than the relational equivalents that preceded them. This is all our clients care about. Possibly RDBMS would have acquitted itself better in your capable hands, and that's fine. In the end, we like RDF and we have good developers, so we use RDF to write good applications. That's really all the justification of RDF that's needed for me. Thanks. -- Uche Ogbuji Principal Consultant uche.ogbuji@f... +1 303 583 9900 x 101 Fourthought, Inc. http://Fourthought.com 4735 East Walnut St, Ste. C, Boulder, CO 80301-2537, USA Software-engineering, knowledge-management, XML, CORBA, Linux, Python
|
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
|