Re: stupid questions

On Tue, 03 May 2005 18:14:49 +0200, M-L Chung <menglin.chung@gmail.com>  
wrote:

Hi Meng Lin

> I know maybe I'm asking stupid questions, but I really need your help.

There are no stupid questions, although lots of people are too stupid to  
ask questions :-)

> Are there any websites based on RDF organizing the resources too?
> Any digital libraries or portals?

I am pretty sure that the New Zealand National Library uses RDF to  
organise at least a part of their collection. There are services like  
RPMfind [1] or foafnaut [2] that are based on using RDF information, and  
there are tools like SWED that search RDF collections. I guess there are  
lots of other systems that use RDF to drive their websites - I am pretty  
sure that the University of maryland RDF group does this, but don't have  
the details on hand.

> Any websites you're impressed on implementing this two technologies
> are appreciated.
>
> I cannot perceive their "power" of  knowledge representation or
> knowledge organization
> because we can also represent semantic relationships without using  
> TMs(or RDF).

> Could anyone tell me what's the advantage for a website(or digital
> library, portal...)
> building with TMs(or RDF) ?  (especially the advantage which couldn't
> be accomplished without TMs [or RDF] )

Well, as a user you shouldn't have to see what is underneath the system.  
Google never tells users how their system really works (that way they are  
a bit safer from spammers and their system works better, but whatever it  
is, it makes it work better than Alata Vista did in 1998. This is what you  
should see with semantic web based systems (and whatever is underneath  
google, it must be a bit like a semantic web system).

One advantage of RDF in particular is that it is very easy to share  
information, and to decide after you have started to build your system how  
two different collections are related. And to change your mind with more  
experience and provide a better mapping between two or several  
collections. This could be done with anything that is widely used and  
allows for easy merging, but most systems don't meet both those criteria.

In other words there is nothing much RDF does that you couldn't do without  
RDF except being compatible with other RDF. But the fact taht there is so  
much of it, and it provides for easy merging, and has a lot of tools  
available means that it is pretty easy to take advantage of the power,  
rather than buildding new tools and systems (which is more expensive).

cheers

Chaals

PS This list has mostly moved to "semantic-web@w3.org"  
<semantic-web@w3.org> (which seems to me a bad idea, since it means people  
who find this list will wonder why it has gone so quiet). You might find  
that is a more useful place to ask questions now.

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile                      Fundacion Sidar
charles@sidar.org   +61 409 134 136    http://www.sidar.org

Received on Sunday, 8 May 2005 14:51:10 UTC