- From: Lee Feigenbaum <feigenbl@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 12:32:12 -0400
- To: public-sweo-ig@w3.org
These comments from Lee an Wing. Overall, this is a great collection of material about the Semantic Web. There are some things that we think should be changed before publishing, however. Our comments follow: --------------------------- Q: How would you define the main goals of the Semantic Web? We don't believe that the goal of the Semantic Web is "to get people to make their data available to others"; is that the W3C's official position? I don't think that that would be a particularly effective way for me to, for example, sell people inside IBM on the merits of SW technologies. We think the answer to this FAQ is improved by removing that first sentence and starting with "The vision..." from the second sentence. Q: What are the major building blocks of the Semantic Web? We think that it would be good to mention (and link to) the specific technology standards in this answer. Q: What is the “killer application” for the Semantic Web? s/"silt // Q: Isn’t the Semantic Web just research, or does it have industrial applications? s/Isn't/Is/ The sentence: """ Companies like Oracle, IBM, Adobe, Software AG, or Northrop Grumman are only some of the large corporations that have picked up this technology already, are selling tools as well as complete business solutions. """ doesn't seem right. Maybe the last part should be its own sentence? """ Oracle, IBM, Adobe, Software AG, or Northrop Grumman are only some of the large corporations that have picked up this technology already and are selling tools as well as complete business solutions. """ Q: Does the Semantic Web require users to understand the complicated details of formalized knowledge representation? Q: I have heard that the costs of using formal semantics is high, and that makes the Semantic Web unreachable for most. Is that correct? These two questions seem to basically be the same. They should probably be combined. We also think that maybe "users" should be "developers"? Q: Does the existing Web have to be rebuilt for the Semantic Web? We think the question is better phrased as: "How is the Semantic Web related to the existing Web?" Similarly, we'd like to see a question that notes that Semantic Web technologies are useful outside of the Web. The very first question hints at this when it talks about data integration, etc., but since a tremendous amount of early adoption is in enterprises and not necessarily on the Web, we think it would be good to acknowledge this... Q: What is the Semantic Web activity at W3C? s/regroups/groups together/ Q: What is the Semantic Web activity at W3C? "URIs" should probably be a link... Q: Where is the “Web” in the Semantic Web? We don't think this question fits the answer very well. The answer starts off about URIs (so maybe the question should be "How does the Semantic Web leverage URIs?") and then in the 2nd paragraph talks about the decentralized nature of RDF assertions (which seems to be a separate question). Also, perhaps this can be combined with the earlier question about the relationship between the current Web and the Semantic Web. Q: What role do ontologies and/or rules have on the Semantic Web? """ Ontologies is a very general term that is meant to “define the concepts and relationships used to describe and represent an area of knowledge”. """ better as: """ Ontologies define the concepts and relationships used to describe and represent an area of knowledge. """ Q: What is “inference” on the Semantic Web? s/physically added/explicitly added/ Q: Does the Semantic Web require everybody to subscribe to a single, predefined, giant ontology? We think the last sentence in the first paragraph should be removed. We think the final sentence of the second paragraph is better as: """ Agreement need only be local, but adoption of vocabulary from existing ontologies facilitates data sharing and integration. """ Q: Do the Semantic Web technologies for Ontology development impose an extra burden on the ontology developers? We think this question is better as: "What is involved in developing an ontology using Semantic Web technologies?" Q: Will W3C be standardizing any particular ontologies? EARL might be a good example here. Q: Is there an uptake in public datasets for the Semantic Web? Are there major data published for the Semantic Web already? The question would be better as: "What major public data sets are available for the Semantic Web?" dbpedia should definitely be included here. maybe govtrack to? Mike Bergman's recent essay on dbpedia had a great list of RDFdata sets ( http://www.mkbergman.com/?p=354 ). Q: … XML Schemas? What does ontologies buy me that XML and XML Schema don't? s/does ontologies/do ontologies/ Q: … folskonomies, microformats, tagging We have suggested new text for the answer to this question (involves splitting it up into two questions also): """ ... tagging, folksonomies Tagging as emerged as a popular method of categorizing content. Users are allowed to attach arbitrary strings to their data items (for example, blog entries and photographs). While tagging is easy and somewhat useful, it destroys a lot of the semantics of the data. In the Semantic Web, instead of tagging data items with strings, they can be related to other resources, like ones representing people and places. The relationships are very specific, like who took the photograph, who is in the photograph, where the photograph was taken. ... microformats Microformats are usually relatively small and simple sets of terms, and must be agreed upon by a community. Data models developed within the framework of the Semantic Web have the potential to be more expressive, rigorous, and formal (and are usually larger). Both can be used to express structured data within web pages. In some cases, microformats are appropriate because the extra features provided by Semantic Web technologies are not necessary. Other cases requiring more rigor will not be able to use microformats. Another difference appears in the way microformats are used by programs. For example, one has to develop a program well-adapted to a particular microformat, to the way it uses, say, the class and title attributes, whereas the generality of the Semantic Web tools makes it easier to reuse existing tools, eg, a query language. It also becomes difficult (though possible) to combine different microformats whereas, combining statements from different origins easily belongs to the very essence of the Semantic Web. Note that the GRDDL Working Group has developed a “bridge”... """ Q: Does the Semantic Web require to manually markup all the existing web-pages, or to convert all the data in relational databases into RDF? s/require to manually/require me to manually/ Q: Does the Semantic Web require to put all my data into the public? What about my sensitive data? s/require to put/require me to put/ s/into the public/into the public domain/ Q: What can I read to understand? The question mght be better as: "How can I learn more about the Semantic Web?" -- General Comments -- We think that the last section of questions (How do I participate in the Semantic Web?) belongs much earlier in the document. We think that the technical questions in the section "Questions on RDF, Ontologies, Rules…" probably belongs last. We (well, Lee especially :-) ) were quite surprised that there's only one mention of SPARQL in the entire document. (And that's in a parenthetical with no explanation, furthermore.) At the very least, SPARQL should be mentioned in the early question about the building blocks of the Semantic Web, and the SPARQL FAQ ( http://thefigtrees.net/lee/sw/sparql-faq ) should be referenced. We're curious about the final presentation of this document. We have two -- somewhat mutually exclusive -- suggestions. The first is that the FAQ could be made into a wiki page. There are a fair amount of small wording issues which we did not highlight above that we (or others) could much more easily fix if the FAQ were a wiki pgae. Alternatively, if the page is not intended to be a wiki, we'd like to suggest using the FAQ system that Lee developed for the SPARQL FAQ. The system for that FAQ has several nice properties which are explained here: http://thefigtrees.net/lee/blog/2006/10/the_sparql_faq_faq_printing_up_2.html . (The look and feel is easily customizable with CSS, of course.) Lee & Wing
Received on Friday, 6 April 2007 16:40:24 UTC