Re: The semantic web

> I have read the article "Practical Knowledge 
Representation for the Web" (
> 
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~frankh/postscript/IJCAI99-III.html#Calvanese:98AAAI 
) and to my surprise, RDF
> is depicted as an immature and disappointing language for 
representing semantics. This is in clear
> contrast with the promise of RDF as the language to make 
the Semantic Web come true.
> The authors could be biased as they come from the AI 
world, but nevertheless, their arguments seem
> well founded to me.

thanks for the link; very interesting article

> Does anyone have comments on this article?

I do :)

- about nesting (3.3)
I think the author are quite unfair : RDF CAN do nesting. 
Sure it is more verbose than plain XML,  and hence less 
readable - is this what they mean when they write that 
nesting is not expressible "in a natural way" ?
Furthermore, this is a syntactical issue, and I think the 
whole RDF community agrees on the necessity of a simplified 
syntax. (Personnaly, I'm even much confident in an 
attribute-based syntax - in the XLink fashion - allowing to 
interpret any XML tags as RDF).

- about RDF beeing property-centric (4.1)
ah ! This is always the itchy part for people used to 
object oriented models. I believe this is not a mistake, 
though : once a property has been defined, any new schema 
can use it, and therefore be (partially) understood by 
anyone understanding that property.This is the whole point 
- and this is possible because the domain of a property can 
ALWAYS be extended (since it is not bound to be unique).
About translating Ontobtoker ontology into RDFS (4.2) , 
prefixing class-names to property-names is not the best 
solution : using a different namespace for each class is 
much more elegant.

- about inferences (4.3)
here is the most unfair point, IMHO : the kind of inference 
proposed here is straightforward in RDFS with 
subPropertyOf.

 Anyone seeing anything I forgot ?

  Pierre-Antoine

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