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.

The opposite? The starting point more like. I'm not sure what you mean by a
closed system in this context - if content goes out on the web, then it is
part of the web, not exactly closed. Things should certainly start getting
interesting when there are a lot of assertions being made of third party
resources, but how exactly do you expect these assertions to be made without
content providers putting assertions in their own content?

I don't dispute that it should be possible to make assertions about
http://www.microsoft.com the URI, whatever the status of the site at the
address that corresponds to.

Danny.