RE: How will the semantic web emerge

No, I am just saying that "duck typing" is bound to win in breadth/reach
scenarios.  There is simply too much transactional friction in all of
the type assessment and mapping to ensure broad deployment outside of
enterprise scenarios.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Henry Story [mailto:henry.story@bblfish.net]
> Sent: Tuesday, December 20, 2005 1:28 PM
> To: Joshua Allen
> Cc: Frank Manola; semantic-web@w3.org
> Subject: Re: How will the semantic web emerge
> 
> Oh, you are worried about typing because it may lead you to have to
> make decisions about which authority to trust. That is a problem of
> database consistency not of typing. If two people say something
> different about someone, such as
> 
> :p rdf:type x:thief.
> 
> and another says
> 
> :p rdf:type x:honest.
> 
> You will need to decide what you should add to your database. And
> there will always be many ways you can render your database
> consistent. You can either reject one or the other proposals, or
> reject the proposal that a man cannot be both honest and a thief.
> 
> This is not a problem with typing. Its a problem about which
> statements you decide to accept and how you decide to keep your
> database consistent. The semantic web leaves that open for you to
> decide. You will have this problem by the way whether you have typing
> or not. As long as you have statements that can be contradictory -
> and unless you have those you won't be able to say anything
> interesting - this problem will appear.
> 
> 
> Henry
> 
> On 20 Dec 2005, at 22:05, Joshua Allen wrote:
> >> More generally, it depends on your general approach to describing
> > things
> >> on the Web.  You can use RDF with a kind of object-oriented design
> >
> > Frank,
> >
> > Your entire message described the debate precisely -- I think of it
as
> > O-O versus Lisp.  I think that the O-O style (strongly typed) will
> > never
> > be the mainstream.  For semweb to be as commonplace as WWW, we need
> > bare
> > naked triples, like lisp.  Just as I can hyperlink to a page,
whether
> > that page is valid, alive, or ever existed; I must be able to read a
> > predicate, whether that resource is properly typed or not.
> >

Received on Tuesday, 20 December 2005 21:31:46 UTC