Re: Semantic Web gTLDs

Dear Valentin

> 
>>One may ask questions why the SW
>> progress has been so slow.
>>If there is any studies on this, please let
>> me know.
> 
> Let me venture a guess: Creating metadata costs effort, spending
> this effort is hard to justify if there are no applications that show the
> benefit of creating the metadata.
> 
> Creating Semantic Web applications is
> difficult if you don't have data, it makes it hard to show that these applications
> are cool. 
> 
> These two things work together to create a massive cold start
> problem; a new tld is not going to do anything about that. 
> 
On the contrary, it would bring momentum to a cold engine.
SW is unknown to the general public, SW seems an old stuff that was
announced by Tim Berners-Lee eons ago with great fanfare,
and now seem ( in the eyes of the public ) a dinosaur...

  > SWepam (Semantic WEb sPAM?) has been
> talked about a lot, but imho it still has to materialize on a big scale and
> some metadata standards managed to evolve by just ignoring this issue (RSS
yes, RSS is a special case, it is not truelly metadata, but a tag
language ( like HTML ) to fill the specific need of feeds and blogs

> or the relTag microformat). Even when you start to worry about trust, there
> got to be less centralized-one-size-fits-all approaches.  
So what do you propose ?
Laissez-faire ?
The proposal is not a fit4all approach, as the specific implementation
will depends on each extension and is a decentralized multi-stakeholder
approach.


> 
>>One goal
>> of a SWgTLD is a get clean, unspoilt, METADATA.
>>Sites that are purposedly
>> spoiling their metadata, are removed
>>from the SWgTLD registry.
> 
> 
> Who's going to decide what "spoiled" metadata is? 
The multi-stakeholder body that would
take over the governance of each specific extension.
Not me !!!


> If it is you, I would image we
> would never see "unspoiled" pornography metadata accepted into the SWgTLD
> (even though you could accurately describe the content of a porn site).
For sure, porn sites would not be accepted in extension that have 
nothing to do with porn like .ART .EQUI .OPEN
This is nothing specific with porn, it is simply that it is
an unrelated topic.

Now if an association of professional pimps want to create
a SWgTLD extension like .PORN, harnessing  all the power
of the SW to better access porn, would it be a better idea that .XXX ?
If it were a way to force pornography into a red district,
possibly yes, but since there is currently no legal way
to force those sites from the World Wild Web to migrate to the .PORN,
in order to purge the WWW from this scourge, I have mixed feelings...
as this would enhance access to pornography..


> The
> more expressive the metadata gets, the more problems you run into: what about
> a site that advertises its Vitamins as "Treatment for Cancer"? It may not
> be supported by medical research, but there is a large minority that things
> this is true and would consider this metadata helpfull. And if you really
> start to put ontologies on the web: what about the site that classifies someone
> like Kissinger as murderer? Gives the age of the world as 6000 years? 
This is not an issue specifically related to SWgtLDs but to the SW in 
general.
I would not care if some sites give the age of the world according to
a litteral biblical computation, well, this is not a corruption, but
a diversity of opinions
Concerning your example of Kissinger, I don't believe that qualification 
of Kissinger in a certain context, like
for example his support for bloody dictatorships in South America, could
be considered as a corruption.  But if in the field, we find
"Buy Viagra at xyz place", this would qualify as a corruption. When this 
happens on a massive scale, this prevent the Metadata to work.

Therefore, one must carefully distinguish "corruption" and "diversity",
cleaning and censorship.

Anyway, this is voluntary process, those who are not happy with
SWgTLDS are not forced to register.
I wish simply good luck to those with a grandiose scheme to transform
the whole WWW in a SW, from this perspective,
the SWgTLD proposal is much more modest... and more realistic.

Best regards

Francis


> 
> 
> cu
> 
> Valentin Zacharias
> FZI (Research Center for Information Technologies)
> 
> http://www.fzi.de/ipe
> Blog: http://vzach.blogspot.com/
> 
> 
> 
> p.s. please
> excuse the strange email address (created by a news reader that aggregates
> information from different rss files and mailinglists). My real address is
> zach@fzi in Germany (tld="de"). 
> 
> 


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Received on Saturday, 8 October 2005 01:17:54 UTC