RE: Myths of the Semantic Web - Popular Misconceptions for Why it Won't Work

<Devil's advocate>

a) depends on what we mean by "ontology" (personally, I am fairly liberal
about it, to mean a model defined in OWL, RDF, RDFS, or a derivative eg:
SKOS) ...sometimes in casual conversation I will allow for "any formal model
is an ontology" sort of thinking, which is how many treat the term. What do
you mean by ontology?

b) if you're doing *no* reasoning whatsoever, why not just put your model in
XML?  There are more tools, and more widespread knowledge of how to use
XSD's...or better yet, if you have SQL developers already, why not just put
in relational tables and use an abstract denormalized schema?

c) you say that "advantages we get from representing our data in RDF are
sufficient to justify the effort without any reasoning" -- but what are
those advantages?  ...are they really technical, or business, advantages
that couldn't be had with the proper Relational or XML schema?  Why not?

</Devil's advocate>

I believe that the area of data security and identity management is a space
that will greatly benefit from the SW family of languages - so, in all
seriousness, if you have the time to reply to the above prodding, I'd love
to hear your thoughts.

-Jeff-


-----Original Message-----
From: public-sweo-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:public-sweo-ig-request@w3.org]
On Behalf Of Steve Harris
Sent: Wednesday, November 08, 2006 7:15 AM
To: jeff.pollock@oracle.com
Cc: public-sweo-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: Myths of the Semantic Web - Popular Misconceptions for Why it
Won't Work



On 8 Nov 2006, at 13:06, Jeff Pollock wrote:
>
> There are plenty of "Myths" out there, such as:
>
> -	Semantic Web makes you tag everything again
> -	Semantic Web requires a single global ontology

Perhaps controversial, but I don't believe that all applications on  
the semantic web require ontologies at all. The application my  
company is deploying now has an ontology, but it's only used  
informatively, and we do no reasoning over it. The advantages we get  
from representing our data in RDF are sufficient to justify the  
effort without any reasoning, and its easier for developers with an  
SQL background to grok. I expect there is data in the store which is  
not described by any ontological structures.

- Steve

Received on Wednesday, 8 November 2006 15:37:13 UTC