Re: No Standard Semantic Web Pragmatics?

* John Black <JohnBlack@deltek.com> [2004-06-13 09:59-0400]
> 
> As a side note, I have a personal suspicion about the genesis of 
> one of the ideas behind RDF. The sole evidence for it is that it 
> explains (to me, at least) one of the more surprising notions that 
> has been advanced about RDF, that the predicate carries the meaning. 
> I suspect that after the web was created the creators looked at it 
> and thought that it was good. An amazing amount of things can be 
> done with just the simple relation of 'isRelatedTo'. Then they said, 
> "But can't we do better than just to say this resource 'isLinkedTo' 
> that resource? Couldn't we make the relation 'isLinkedTo' (or 
> 'isRelatedTo') carry more meaning. We should be able to say, 
> 'isLinkedToAsCreatorOf' or 'isLinkedToAsTheDateOf'. And instead 
> of creating the link by embedding one URI in a document identified 
> by another URI, lets give that more meaningful 
> 'isLinkedToAsCreateorOf' a URI name so that the meaning of the 
> relation expressed can actually be looked up on the web as well." 
> Sorry for the digression and for the error if I am mistaken.

A fair amount of the current RDF design was there right from the start.
http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html is the original proposal
for the Web (by TimBL to Cern folk). 
It doesn't talk much about URIs/URLs, but certainly establishes some 
of the key principles we're still chasing around after today...

Dan

Received on Monday, 14 June 2004 15:14:23 UTC