- From: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2007 10:46:58 -0500
- To: tim.glover@bt.com
- Cc: hans.teijgeler@quicknet.nl, semantic-web@w3.org
> It is ironic that the word "semantic" seems to have become > meaningless... I sometimes joke about how the word "meaning" doesn't seem to have any meaning any more. :-) (But in fact it does -- the most effective definitions I find for "meaning" and "semantics" have to do with entailments, with consequences, eventually with impact on people's lives.) > What are the ambitions of the semantic web? ... > Sorry if this is old hat, but I am not sure that the SW community even > agree what "semantic" means. It's about shared impact on our lives, shared experience -- which we're quite familiar with from the web. The web works because web addresses are effective ways to refer for sharable experiences. Earlier, Hans wrote: > What I see happening is that > everybody can and often does invent instances of owl:Class and > owl:ObjectProperty on-the-fly, and then seems to expect that DL will be > the band-aid that solves all integration problems. In order to assist > the reasoners all sorts of qualifications are added (re OWL1.1), but to > me it seems that when this is done, actually a (rather private) data > model is created again. ... > The thing puzzling me is how the SW community can see what I cannot see, > and that is how on earth you can achieve what your Activity Statement > says, without such a standard generic data model and derived standard > reference data (taxonomy and ontology). But perhaps not many SW-ers > bother about the need of universal integration, and are happily > operating within their own subdomain, such as FOAF. The missing trick, I think, is the "Web" part of "Semantic Web". The idea is that whenever you invent an owl:Class or owl:ObjectProperty or whatever, you put it on the web. (That's why its name is a URI, although I recognize there are still some huge practical and theoretical problems with this vision.) And then, in theory, the basic social forces which give us a few good web pages about any subject -- and make the web useful -- also push toward reuse, maintenance, and improvement of core ontology elements. -- Sandro
Received on Monday, 5 March 2007 15:48:15 UTC