RE: Documents, Cars, Hills, and Valleys

> couple of points I must take issue with. The main issue for me is the
> underlying assumption that a semantic web needs the explicit assertion
of
> metadata by content providers for it to work. A related issue, IMHO,
is

This is exactly opposite to what the semantic web is about.  A content
provider putting assertions inside his own content is a closed system.
We want 5,000 different people to be able to make assertions about
http://www.microsoft.com, without needing the cooperation of Microsoft
or any other central authority.  They should be able to make these
assertions even if http://www.microsoft.com happens to be unavailable.

I think Sean's example did a fine job of explaining the problem.