RE: thoughts and some refs about AFS-2 UC (simplicity, minimalism )

On Mar 23, 2004, at 12:55, ext Andy Seaborne wrote:

> Rob - is your concern that any protocol work would slow down 
> query work?
> 
> My impression, and given my background, is that there is more work in
> getting the details of query pinned down than in a *simple* 
> access protocol
> - my impression may well be wrong of course.  (We also have 
> the option of
> using invited experts if we feel we do not have coverage.)  I 
> don't see that
> protocol work need alter Dan's timescale.

Yes, the time and resources we'd devote to protocol are of concern to
me.

I fear that we're underestimating the amount of work required to
generate a genuinely useful protocol. Security, for one, is an issue
that can't be ignored.

As for the rest of your (very lucid) comments, I also think we might be
overestimating the "distributed computation" aspect of the semantic web.
I find the concept of an unfamiliar remote machine offering robust query
services a bit farfetched. As we all know, querying arbitrary RDF graphs
is much much more difficult than simply publishing sets of documents.

In practice, I don't see many servers publishing generic query
functionality for all of their data any more than people are publicizing
SQL access to their databases. The "web" aspect emerges from the
distribution of the raw data, and I fear that a vision of remote query
services as opposed to clever local collection and processing of remote
documents actually constrains the manner in which such a web can be
built. The attempt to push query functionality into the RDF servers
themselves (which form the true RDF "network") seems to go completely
against the "dumb net, smart endpoint" notion which underlies all levels
of the internet.

Received on Tuesday, 23 March 2004 16:22:26 UTC