Re: [tangle] getting the semweb exactly wrong

On Jan 3, 2006, at 12:35 PM, Frank Manola wrote:
> Timothy Falconer wrote:
>> Blog post excerpt:
>> "Reading such comments confounds me, since they've got it  
>> *exactly* wrong. The Semantic Web approach is LOOSE, not normalized.
>> ...
>  ...
> RDF data is *highly* normalized: RDF essentially organizes data as  
> binary relations (one per property) with surrogate keys (URIs),  
> which is as normalized as you can get.  This high degree of  
> normalization is one of the things that makes the data structure so  
> flexible. RDF is looser than the relational model in some other  
> respects, but they have nothing to do with normalization.   
> "Normalized" isn't properly the opposite of "loose" either

Frank,

You are of course correct.  As Danny pointed out, I was responding to  
David's comment.    I did balk at the term "normalized" when I wrote  
it, and tried a few other terms like "too constrained", "brittle",  
"rigid", "limiting", etc, but they didn't flow from the quote so left  
it as is.

Probably the best word to use in answer to his quote is "un-webby".    
RDF is "webby", not "un-webby".    Remember, David Weinberger's the  
guy who wrote "Small Pieces Loosely Joined", so being webby is a big  
thing for him, as it is for a lot of us.   Being webby's what made  
HTML/HTTP take off over the other more prescriptive hypertext schemes  
of the time.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Timothy Falconer
www.bigfractaltangle.com
610-393-1889 (mobile)

Immuexa Corporation
www.immuexa.com
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On Jan 3, 2006, at 12:58 PM, Danny Ayers wrote:
>> Timothy Falconer wrote:
>>> Blog post excerpt:
>>>
>>> "Reading such comments confounds me, since they've got it *exactly*
>>> wrong. The Semantic Web approach is LOOSE, not normalized.
>
> http://bigfractaltangle.com/archive/2006/01/02.jsp
>
> On 1/3/06, Frank Manola <fmanola@acm.org> wrote:
> ...
> However,
>> if that's the case, from a relational data modeling perspective, RDF
>> data is *highly* normalized:
>
> Frank's technically correct of course, but in Timothy's defence, the
> word "normalized" came from a David Weinberger quote :
> [[
> I fear that the Semantic Web will go the way of SGML and for basically
> the same reason: normalization of metadata works real well in confined
> applications where the payoff is high, control is centralized and
> discipline can be enforced. In other words: not the Web.
> ]]