RE: good elevator pitch for Semantic Web

On Fri, 20 Apr 2001, Dan Brickley wrote:

> On Fri, 20 Apr 2001, Didier PH Martin wrote:
> 
> > Hi Jeremy
> > 
> > I agree, by definition an elevator pitch is at the most 30 second discourse.
> > Forget about the scientific American article, its too long think 30
> > second...
> 
> OK. Heres *a* 30 second RDF/SW pitch (audience matters): it's all about
> making Web-accessible data easier to automate by agreeing explicit names
> for meaningful relationships between things we describe in the
> Web. Some real world examples: "is a critical review of...",
> "works for the organisation whose home page is", "wrote the document
> available at", "is pictured in the image available at", "recorded by
> the dodgy rock band whose corporate home page is..." (much handwaving 
> appropriate at this stage, indicative of invisible nodes and arcs being
> represented in confined elevator space...). The Web is about links; the
> Semantic Web is about the relationships implicit in those links. --danbri

Or, turning this on its head slightly...

The Web is (primarily) about human-readable Web pages and the links
between them - but where the linkage is very simple and generic ("this
page is related to that page").  The Semantic Web is (primarily) about
making machine-readable statements about all kinds of things (Web pages,
organisations, people, concepts, products, etc.) and the links between
them - and where explicit names are agreed for the relationships between
things. For example, "this person works for that organisation", "this
organisation has a home page at", "this person is author of the page at",
"this person's phone number is", "this person is pictured in the image
at", "this organisation sells that product", "this products costs that
amount for that person", etc.

Andy
--
Distributed Systems and Services
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Received on Saturday, 21 April 2001 03:48:55 UTC