RDF for 12 year olds was Re: A discussion: Is semantic web an old fashioned idea? Is it bubble, unworthy or an interesting research area - Post your comments

Mazzilli, Rodrigo wrote:

> HTML
>1.0 was probably not the best hypertext markup language we could have
>invented but it was simple and straightforward! Even a 12-year-old child
>could understand it and (boom!) suddenly everyone was writing web pages.
>

Is the same level of simplicity possible for the SemWeb? I think we 
better try to make it so if it is to catch on. If people ad-hocly agree 
to particular vocabularies and unique names i think we're 85% there. As 
the back-end state of the art advances I don't even think people need to 
be particular precise or accurate in their usage.

I think its easy to forget how abstract and complex SemWeb technology 
appears to the vast majority of developers, even those that have built 
successful web applications.

Here's my attempt to explain RDF to novices:
http://rx4rdf.liminalzone.org/RDF

and a wiki-like text format for RDF also geared to novices:
http://rx4rdf.liminalzone.org/RxML

However, since you don't "waste your time" investigating non-W3C 
compliant representations, you should ignore this message.

-- adam

>Hello all,
>
>I think we make a big mistake if we attempt to compare the WWW evolution
>with current SemWeb efforts. 
>Simply put, SemWeb is a far more complex attempt to bring the world
>together than the WWW technologies developed at CERN. Complexity is not
>however the only factor!
>
>The main problem in my opinion is that SemWeb has some (critical) areas
>which still need some research. Most important though, implementations
>*should comply* to W3C's standards definition. WWW succeeded simply
>because it was based on basic standards which everyone accepted! HTML
>1.0 was probably not the best hypertext markup language we could have
>invented but it was simple and straightforward! Even a 12-year-old child
>could understand it and (boom!) suddenly everyone was writing web pages.
>For instance, ontologies available today differ very much in format.
>Some have plain XML+Namespaces, some plain text file, some DAML, some
>RDF and some OWL and many more. 
>
>Personally I don't waste my time investigating representations or
>implementations which are not W3C compliant, which I consider THE
>authority in Semweb efforts.
>
>Regards,
>Rodrigo
>______________________________________________________________________
> Rodrigo B Mazzilli
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>
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Received on Wednesday, 16 June 2004 12:07:07 UTC