Re: Basics of Effective Learning

Sandro Hawke wrote:
>>[[I quite liked Tom Gruber's keynote on 'Social Web'. Tom tried to avoid
>>the controversial Web 2.0 term and talked rather of the collective
>>intelligence of folksonomies, tagging, blogging, etc. It was good to
> 
> 
> I liked his point that Web 2.0 is really "collected intelligence" and we
> still haven't gotten to "collective intelligence".  :-)
> 
> 
>>hear a talk that avoids the unnecessary controversy on the relationship
>>between Web 2.0 and, say, the Semantic Web. Tom also talked about an
>>attempt to give a more coherent ontological model for tagging, though it
>>seems that this work is stalled due to missing people to work on it (see
>>also an earlier blog[4] he had on this for some more details). Would be
>>good to pick this up]]
>>
>>Actually, the comment on Tim O'Reilly's blog that caught my eyes is the
>>one of Steve Loughran. He says:
>>
>>"semantic web is built on ontologies and ubiquitous RDF"
>>
>>which, in this form, is incorrect and one of the 'myths' we do have
>>around SW (maybe we should make it part of[5]), namely that any SW
>>application must use ontologies, ie (according to this line of thought)
>>has to use OWL, ie, is based on complex and difficult-to-understand
>>concepts.
> 
> 
> In itself, I don't think that statement is a myth.  You can't use RDF
> without a shared understanding of what certain URIs mean, typically some
> class and property URIs.  In Tom Gruber's world, at least, that shared
> understanding is, loosely speaking, an ontology.  Strictly speaking, the
> specification that enables that shared understanding is the ontology.
> (He talked about this a bit at the keynote, but also in a document from
> 13 years ago, where I first saw his name [1].)

Oh yes, that is true (I made this mistake once and JimH corrected me:-).
What *is* a myth is that you have to use the full power of OWL all the
time...

> 
> It would be good if we could come up with a simpler, more accepted term
> for this concept.   Some options:
> 
>     ontology
>     (controlled) vocabulary
>     (data) dictionary
>     (rdf) schema
>     (data structure) interface
>     language fragment
> 

I still prefer the (controlled) vocabulary. It is suboptimal, but seems
the best among those...

Ivan

> Doesn't look good.   :-)
> 
>     -- Sandro
> 
> [1] http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/what-is-an-ontology.html

-- 

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
URL: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
PGP Key: http://www.cwi.nl/%7Eivan/AboutMe/pgpkey.html
FOAF: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf.rdf