RE: Where are the semantics in the semantic Web?

Dear Shi Xuan, 

there are levels of machine processability. The current Web is very much
machine-processable - my browser processes and displays HTML on a daily
basis, and it even processes the more powerful flash programs. And my
SOAP stack processes WSDLs with ease.

With this in mind, you have to see that TimBL's definition of "semantic"
as "machine-processable" does not demand full "machine-processability",
just a higher level of it. The Semantic Web people and the SWS people
have different use cases, they want the machines to do different tasks,
therefore they will represent different information in a
machine-processable way. For SemWeb, it's probably about search by
inference; for SWS it's about discovery and composition of processes.

Whoever criticizes WSDL as "not semantic", really means "not semantic
enough", and that's what WSDL-S wants to mitigate (at least partially),
for a limited set of use cases (again). Nobody here wants the big
solution, as that would be strong AI. What we want is to solve small
well-defined problems, and we try to use the same tools so that we
benefit from unexpected correlations that might arise, among others*.

So what I'm saying is - with SemWeb and SWS we are trying to scope the
AI discussions in smaller compartments, and I'm afraid the recent
threads went well above any of these small scopes.

Best regards,

Jacek

*other benefits of using the same tools is that they get hardened
(debugged) and better known when more people use them, so they get
easier to use. And I'm not talking about WSMO vs. OWL-S - who don't
share much - but I'm talking about W3C trying to standardize something
akin to WSDL-S, building on RDF and XML/WSDL, those are the common
tools.


On Fri, 2005-11-25 at 14:18 -0500, Shi, Xuan wrote:
> When Tim Berners-Lee defined the semantic Web, the word "semantic" meant
> "machine processable".  Now that Web services are designed for
> "machine-processable", WSDL is criticized as not "semantic". The word
> "semantic" in Semantic Web Services seems different from that in Semantic
> Web?
> 
> If Tim Berners-Lee's definition is still effective, we can understand both
> XML and RDF/OWL are machine-processible. Which way we should go? Still it's
> an issue of agreement and standardization, otherwise, we have to continue
> our debate. Especially according to Tim Berners-Lee's definition, WSDL is
> machine-processible then why should we again add "semantics" onto such
> machine-processible (thus "semantic") WSDL document? Or we are talking about
> something different in the domains of SW and SWS?
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joachim Peer
> To: jeff@inf.ed.ac.uk
> Cc: Harry Halpin; public-sws-ig@w3.org
> Sent: 11/25/05 9:00 AM
> Subject: Re: Where are the semantics in the semantic Web?
> 
> dear all,
> 
> i've followed this thread with great interest. i have tried to summarize
> some technical (pro XML) arguments in a little paper which is attached
> to this mail
> 
> kind regards!
> Joachim
> 
>  <<rdfxml.pdf>> 
>

Received on Thursday, 8 December 2005 09:12:46 UTC