RE: More On the Semantic Web (or: is RDF any good?)

On Mon, 6 Nov 2000, William Loughborough wrote:

> Any idea why it can't be done this year?

Well, I was trying to cover myself :-)  I'm imagining that first a group
of technologists has to "agree" on some kind of standard, and then their
work has to be adopted by a large enough group of webmasters for the whole
thing to be "useful".

However, because the Web is described by Zipf's law [1], you might get
good value out of convincing "only" the top 100 sites (in page views) to
implement your semantic system.  Then a form of Metcalfe's law [2]
applies, where other web sites have more and more reasons to join.


-Matt Jensen
 NewsBlip
 Seattle

---
[1] http://linkage.rockefeller.edu/wli/zipf/
[2] http://www.mgt.smsu.edu/mgt487/mgtissue/newstrat/metcalfe.htm