[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Semantic Web (Was: [ANN]: /refind.xml)
On Thu, Aug 02, 2001 at 11:45:10AM -0400, team refind wrote: > The semantic web will never happen until all members of society > participate. People will *never* participate until they see benefits. The > burden is on us all as developers to make things drastically simpler and > empower every citizen with the power of information. Only when computers can Hum, semantic: yes, web: yes ! semantic web: very doubtful ... After 3 years of rpmfind experience (large catalog/database of mostly Linux free software [1]), well I don't believe much in a Semantic Web as defined by most people. I do provide an RDF [2] catalog for all the database content. I think I can try to draw a few lessons from this experiment up to now: - RDF serialization is so scary that other people (like Ximian [3]) which needed similar package description used another format - having the data exposed on the web, actually led to some reuse, though is seems that for such databases people prefers to grab a snapshot, and work on it, not query the web each time - trying to make the data format "self explanatory" didn't help, the various code base using the rpmfind RDF did not merge, even if I tried to provide a small module in the rpm2html/rpmfind code isolating access methods. I never noticed any generic RDF engine crawling the database (but I have seen classic XML indexing engines) - it didn't solved the problem of aggregation which is the most annoying one for catalogs (you build one, I build one, how does someone else query the full set) - XML didn't make it in the browser, so the XML database is imited to tools consumption, and cannot be browsed directly by humans. The advantage of using a portable format didn't really scale beyond specialized tools. On the other hand the web database front-end has been a great success (many Mhits/month). - Initially the XML format was the database and HTML pages were generated from them. At some point I really had to use a database engine to allow powerful/fast searches, now the RDF is generated from the database like the HTML pages. Basically the result is mitigated, yes exposing the XML database on the web was useful for tools. But it didn't reach humans. Hence it did stay limited to the audience using the specific tools, and the hopes that the genericity of a format like RDF would allow unspecialized engines to profit from it didn't realized until now. If I had to rebuild the service from scratch I would probably still use it anyways, maybe the next report 3 years from now will allow to claim success, but it is really doubtful. I'm also still waiting for a free software database targetted at XML, I'm more optimistic on this one :-) Daniel [1] http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/ [2] http://rpmfind.net/linux/RDF/ [3] http://ximian.com/ -- Daniel Veillard | Red Hat Network http://redhat.com/products/network/ veillard@r... | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit http://xmlsoft.org/ http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/
|
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
|