Re: Semantic Web Languages

On 3/30/06, tim.glover@bt.com <tim.glover@bt.com> wrote:

> I agree that language design requires taste and judgment, and that RDF
> and OWL conspicuously lack both.

I beg to differ, but these are subjective qualities, not easily quantified.

More generally, the obsession with
> using XML and URIs for everything, including programming language
> syntax, has been a disaster for the Semantic Web, and the Web in
> general, and must have cost billions.

URIs are the identifiers of the Web, without them it couldn't
function. They also enable global disambiguation of names, rather a
prerequisite for a Semantic Web.

Whether something other than XML might have been better for many of
the places on the Web in which it's used is debatable, but having a
common syntax has shown significant benefits on and off the Web. It's
support for Unicode is a huge plus.

> It seems to me that in order to make progress, we have to look backwards
> for a while. When the SW community is familiar with PROLOG perhaps they
> will be ready to move forwards, to pragmatics :)

You don't need to look back to Usenet to identify a troll ;-)

[John]
> Apple's OS X is built on top of a version of Unix, which is
> much more flexible and modular than Windows.  Therefore, they
> have already implemented most of the features that are planned
> for Vista at a fraction of the cost in time, money, and human
> effort.

HTTP+(X)HTML+URIs, are effectively the OS of the Web. For basic
doc/hypertext work on the Web these are  more than adequate. Semantic
Web technologies build on these.

When I'm working with logic-thin syndication data I generally use
these plus RDF plus inverse functional properties (from OWL, to allow
by-description person identification). I've mostly been using the
Python binding of Redland on Linux. The SPARQL query language has
simplified a lot of interfacing with the data, an XML projection of
results is easy to convert into any target format.

One of my dayjob contracts requires a kind of validation outside of
RDF/OWL, this I'm implementing using custom (mostly hard-coded) logic
on top of the RDF/OWL representation. There's too much data  for
complete OWL DL reasoning in the large, but for sanity-testing and
local data checks Pellet has been useful. (The dayjob stuff is based
on Jena/Java, the deployment target is again Linux but I've been
developing on this, Win32 and more recently OS X). Throughout this
work I'm mixing and matching numerous RDFS vocabularies/OWL ontologies
as demanded by the domain.

The layering of the framework allows me to do all this in a
Web-friendly, consistent fashion. If this isn't modular, I don't know
what is.

> Moral:  I suggest that the SemWebbers either think more like
> Steve Jobs than Bill Gates or that they do more design
> competitions and evaluation of alternatives.

I seem to remember Bill Gates had little to say about the Internet in
the first edition of "The Road Ahead". In the last year or two both
Apple and MS have been leaping on the lowest rungs of the SemWeb layer
cake, notably profitably "embracing and extending" the XML
applications RSS and Podcasting. Believe me, they're not good role
models for logic on the Web ;-)

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com

Received on Friday, 31 March 2006 12:33:24 UTC