RE: Question...

Nova,

There was a discussion recently on the SWEO list about seeing
folksonomy-style approaches and semweb approaches as 2 ends of a
spectrum and in no way mutually exclusive. Here's a snippet from a post
I made:

"I tend to present Web2.0 and OWL-based (say) ontologies as at 2 ends of
a continuum, with taxonomies in the middle and thesauri, term lists, etc
at different places on the line.

In my view there is no mutual exclusivity here - in one recent exchange
to try and get this point across I said: 

'Some things (flickr) will have a folksonomy and no interest or
requirement in moving to an ontology or other more formal structure.
Some things (healthcare apps) will use a formal logic-based ontology and
would kill people (in the case of health) if they relied on clinician's
inputting semi-random tags. Some things (some semantic wiki apps, for
example) will benefit from marrying Web 2.0 and semantic technology.' "

And here's some very good (IMHO) slides from Jeff Pollock @ Oracle:
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/2007/Pollock.SDForum.Ontology-vs-F
olksonomy.small.ppt

Regarding non-trivial use cases of semantic technology, there is a
400000+ class OWL ontology representing the SNOMED-CT medical
terminology (http://www.snomed.org/) which we in BT are using with
customers right now if that helps. As I mentioned baove, if you tried to
use a folksonomy for the sme thing you might end up killing people.
 
Regards,
John Davies.



-----Original Message-----
From: public-sweo-ig-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-sweo-ig-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Danny Ayers
Sent: 18 March 2007 18:22
To: W3C SWEO IG
Cc: nova@radarnetworks.com
Subject: Fwd: Question...

[seems like a job for SWEO!]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nova Spivack <nova@radarnetworks.com>

Hey guys - I'm supposed to be speaking about the semweb on a panel
moderated by none other than Clay Shirky (who hates the semweb and
generally misrepresents it) on Monday (at the Highlands Forum).

I was wondering --- are there any stats I can cite about the semweb that
will help to head of his criticisms?

- Number of SPARQL endpoints, or growth of them?

- Growth of semweb? Any metrics you know of?

Anything else you think I might cite?

Clay generally attacks the semweb on the grounds that social tagging is
better than inferencing. Duh. That's a completely made-up conflict since
the semweb is a natural fit with tagging, and secondly since the semweb
does not only focused on inferencing. In any case, the question is how
to deal with him.

N

-- 

http://dannyayers.com

Received on Monday, 19 March 2007 09:33:29 UTC