Re: comments on the SW FAQ

Wing C Yung wrote:
> Ivan, here are some long-overdue comments on the FAQ.
> 
>>> 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.
>>>
>>>
>> Let us discuss that. When I wrote this, I tried to avoid diving into to
>> too much technical details on this answer. There are other sections
>> where more specific links are added, but I tried to keep to stay in
>> generality at that point. What do you think?
> 
> We think it would be good to mention the names of the technologies so that
> readers have something to search for when they go to do more research. We
> agree that the description should be high-level and not too technically
> detailed.
> 

O.k. I will add just the acronyms of the relevant specs at the end of
the bulleted items.

>>> 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...
>>>
>> That is controversial, I am not sure how to formulate this. Lots of
>> people would consider that a 'misuse' of the SW technologies, because
>> the 'Web' aspect is missing. Can you help writing this down somehow?
> 
> Thoughts on the following?
> 
> Q: Is it possible to use Semantic Web technologies outside of a Web
> application?
> 
> A: Yes, the Semantic Web standards can be used to model, query, and reason
> with data for any application, not just Web applications. Non-Web
> applications can still enjoy the benefits of the Semantic Web because they
> can use the simple and expressive data model, leverage existing tools and
> libraries, and share and merge data more easily when the need arises. Even
> non-Web applications, however, should pay close attention to the URIs that
> are assigned to resources in the data; depending on the nature of the data
> developers should consider ensuring the resolvability of the URIs.
> 

Hm. I think that some more thing should be added, I do not really know
how to formulate it (maybe you could have a go). The point is that a
number of features of SW techs were defined *with the Web in mind* (Open
World is a typical case). The same holds for the tools developed for the
SW. If somebody uses these for internal applications, so to say, that is
fine, but this should be kept in mind somehow...




-- 

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
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