Re: Two comments to the FAQ

Thanks Kjetil! These are exactly the comments I need. See my specific
answers below

Kjetil Kjernsmo wrote:
> All,
> 
> After intense enquiries, I had a look in the FAQ. I think it is mostly 
> fine, good enough to publish, FAQs shouldn't be too big from the 
> outset, it isn't QWWYA (Questions We Wished You'd Ask), it should be 
> responses to actual things that people are often curious about.
> 
> I have two comments, one is about the relationship to microformats, 
> http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/SW-FAQ#Folskonomi [sic!]
> 
> where it is stated that ontologies are usually larger and more rigorous. 
> I think that is not necessarily true. To the contrary, it looks 
> like "if it's not on microformats.org it's not a microformat", whereas 
> anyone who has a URI space can create an ontology. Like my first 
> gallery ontology, http://my.opera.com/community/xmlns/2005/gallery.rdf 
> was created without asking anyone, whereas version 2 of it 
> http://my.opera.com/community/xmlns/2006/gallery.rdf
> was created after two hours on IRC. I think we're more decentralised and 
> flexible than most, and that we should emphasize this.
> 

Hm. To be fair, I am not sure that is true. On the one hand, almost
anyone can create a new microformat and them to the microformat wiki
page. And I also believe that the strength of the microformat comes when
one talks about 2-3 terms only or, turn it around, the strength of the
SW in this respect is that RDF/RDFS/SKOS/OWL can express things that are
impossible to do with microformats.

> Now, I haven't been participating too much in the microformats 
> community, I can't really say what distinguishes us, but let me just 
> throw this out: With microformats you need programmer interference for 
> everything, even writing the (simple) parser. You can't connect the 
> data trivially, and you have a namespacing problem. With RDF you have a 
> data model, you have a query language. I think we need more 
> clarification on this topic. 
> 

Yes. I have added the following paragraph, comments please:-)

[[[
Another difference appears in the way microformats and/or tags 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 exisiting 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.
]]]

(It is not yet on the web, I want feedback first)


> My other comment is regarding tools:
> 
> http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/SW-FAQ#tools
> 
> I think it is hard to say that our tools are of the same quality that 
> XML tools are. For example, Robin Berjon, one of the great Joost 
> hackers, posted a message to the new Perl-RDF list 
> http://lists.perlrdf.org/pipermail/dev/2007-February/000004.html
> saying 
> "I've long been interested in RDF, but have long been frustrated  
> with the quality of the tools (not just in Perl, the Java ones are  
> far from ideal either) and as a consequence I'm still dabbling with  
> using XML + XQuery instead of RDF + SPARQL for the areas that  
> interest me personally"
> 
> I've personally spoken with a lot of people who see the performance of 
> tools that are available as really bad, including some really good 
> hackers. This, IIRC, was also said in response to our enterprise 
> questionnaire. 
> 
> There is a real risk over overstating our case here, and make early 
> adopters turn around.
> 

Yes. Right. Here is a possible replacement text for that section:

[[[
In general most of the tools are of a good quality already. On the open
source domain Jena, for example, can easily be compared to xerces in its
widespread usage and richness of features; databases like Sesame are
also in widespread use and have undergone a very thorough development in
the past few years. There are more and more commercial tools, including
editors, specialized databases, content management systems, ontology
creation and validation tools, etc. The Wiki page on the W3C ESW Wiki
site gives a good overview of most of those.

Obviously, there is room for improvement. SW is a younger technology
than XML (if we refer to the year 2004 when the core technologies became
really stable), and it still needs time to catch up and have tools of
the same maturity and efficiency level than the XML World. However, huge
improvements have already been made in the past few years in all areas,
and large-scale enterprise deployment is also happening already. In
general: availability of tools is not a reason any more for not
developing Semantic Web applications…
]]]


Thanks Kjetil


Ivan

> OTOH, we see that some have 1.5 billion triples, we see successful 
> large-scale enterprise deployments, and think it would be very 
> interesting to learn about what they've done right, and if they have 
> bumped into the performance issues others have had and how they 
> overcame them.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Kjetil

-- 

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