[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: WSIO vs. Semantic Web
On Wednesday 13 February 2002 15:32, Mark Seaborne wrote: > I hesitate to ask, but can anyone tell me what are the real differences > between web services and the semantic web? As I see it (and will probably now be flamed for): Web Services are web sites providing programmeable interfaces as well as human interfaces. This allows people to write tools that do stuff like interact with all the auction sites out there to search them all for something you're after. It depends on two interesting things we have yet to really resolve: 1) How to find all the auction sites out there. Maintaining a list by hand would [expletive deleted]. Much nicer to have a directory, like a CORBA trader, where auction sites register saying "I provide the standard Auction Site API at this URL". 2) Standardising APIs for various things. Do you POST a request to a certain URI and get the answer in your response? What if it's something complex and transactional that involves much two-way communication? The semantic web is something a bit more abstract, but more 'read only'; instead of having a Web of pages we have a Web of *information* with rendering information attached to it. We don't need to standardise the schemas so much as standardising the metaschemas so the browsers and spiders can locate informational links between things; not just hyperlinks, but the fact that one site uses a term and another site claims to offer a definition of that term... making an implicit link that neither site needs to 'maintain'. If all references to me use some unique identifier (my urn:oid: URN from the other thread will do :-), then documents making statements about me can all (from software) be seen to be making interrelated statements about the same person. This is a step above just searching on my name as a keyword, and even a step above searching on my URI to get a list of matching pages; the semantic web is a set of 'things' with 'relationships' between them. Using standard relationships, for example, my URI could be related to the string 'Alaric Blagrave Snell' with the relationship 'Is Legally Named', and also have the property 'Is A Human Being', and related to the URI for my company (urn:oid:1.2.826.0.1.4062548) by the relationship 'Is A Registered Director Of', and so on. Software can know what these relationships mean; even if the software does not know the exact relationship, it might be able to derive (from the URI representing the relationship) metadata about the relationship... 'Is A Registered Director Of' might declare itself as being a more specific version of 'Is A Part Of This Group', which covers religious affiliations, national affiliations, and so on. (1) is more about processes, (2) is more about information. Does that sound about right? > > Mark Seaborne > ABS -- Alaric B. Snell http://www.alaric-snell.com/ http://RFC.net/ http://www.warhead.org.uk/ Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software
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