- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
- Date: Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:09:15 +0100
- To: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Cc: Damian Steer <d.steer@bristol.ac.uk>, Hugh Glaser <hg@ecs.soton.ac.uk>, "public-lod@w3.org" <public-lod@w3.org>
On 17 Feb 2010, at 18:14, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us> wrote: > > On Feb 17, 2010, at 6:37 AM, Dan Brickley wrote: > >> ... . RDF was originally >> standardised as a metadata system, a mechanism for finding stuff ... >> whether that stuff was photos, videos, HTML pages, excel >> spreadsheets, >> SQL databases, 3d models. ... > > Really? That was not the impression I got when I first got involved > with it. In fact, I asked explicitly for clarification, at the first > F2F in Sebastopol: is RDF intended to be metadata for Web 'objects', > or is it supposed to be a notation for describing **things in > general**? And the resounding chorus from the WG was the latter, > most definitely not the former. (Which is also what Guha told me > right after the very first RDF speclet was first released.) And that > is why I designed the semantics based on a logical model theory > rather than a computational annotation system. If RDF was supposed > to be primarily a mechanism for finding stuff, then we designed it > wrong. The original use cases were various flavours of 'metadata'; however that concept melts on closer inspection. We did the right thing by going with a general system; but we did lose touch a bit with some of the original scenarios which motivated W3C to standardise RDF in '97. MCF and RDF were never themselves technologies with a built-in scope of 'describing only data', and that was all fine and good. Whenever you dig into 'metadata' requirements you soon find that the whole world is soon in-scope. The gamble of course with a highly general standard is that it can be used in-principle for *everything* but risks in practice being used for nothing. It took us a while to find that niche... Dan > Pat > > ------------------------------------------------------------ > IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494 > 3973 > 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office > Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax > FL 32502 (850)291 0667 mobile > phayesAT-SIGNihmc.us http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes > > > > >
Received on Wednesday, 17 February 2010 20:09:34 UTC