Re: FW: Cursors face defining moments on the Web

At 10:45 PM 1/28/01 -0800, Joshua Allen wrote:
>"A series of deals will allow customers to access dictionary definitions
>and encyclopedia listings from anywhere on the Web with the click of a
>mouse."
>
>http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-4628955.html?tag=mn_hd
>
> >From CNET.  I figure Dan Brickley at least would be interested.
>The semantic web may be birthing itself quicker than we think,
>and the midwives delivering it may not even be aware of RDF.
>Something like this one is certainly brain-dead easy to implement
>atop IE or Netscape (I'm surprised it took this long for someone to
>do it).  And I've a notion that this is just going to encourage a
>bunch more people to try out other similar things.  All without
>paying attention to RDF's lessons learned.  Does this concern
>anyone?  Any ideas?

I think it is good that folks are working on and deploying supporting 
technologies.  I think the adoption of RDF will, in due course, be a way to 
exchange and integrate all this information.

I'm talking to engineers in my company about putting RDF data export 
capabilities into 2nd and later product generations:  in the scheme of 
things, it's really not such a big deal.

The diversity of network protocols pre-IP didn't (in the long term) prevent 
the take-up of IP, and allowed a lot of ideas to get developed and 
deployed.  In my view, RDF is the "end to end" underpinning that can bring 
this stuff together.

I think there are still many big challenges to be addressed, but I don't 
see online dictionary services and the like in any way harming those efforts.

#g