Re: [ANN] A pragmatic implementation of the Semantic Web

Hi Zaid,

ALT Mobile DEV wrote:
> I am pleased to announce that my company is shipping developer tools 
> and servers which solve many of the underlying impediments in 
> realizing the Semantic Web vision. To accomplish this, I have 
> significantly diverged from the prescribed W3C implementation and 
> standards and have leveraged the proven ideas and technologies of Web 
> 2.0. I have summarized much of our implementation details to enable 
> the Semantic Web community to understand our reasons for divergence 
> and hopefully to work with me to ensure that the Semantic Web vision 
> can become a mainstream reality in the near term.
>
Congratulations on shipping!

Before this thread predictably spirals out of control, into an orgy of 
historical corrections and so forth, can I make a suggestion?

If you've built something you're proud of, using W3C Semantic Web 
technologies (RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL etc) that's great. If you used 
related ideas using different technologies, that's great too.But your 
email below comes across as rather negative, and makes a series of 
largely false mis-characterisations of our work here. I suggest it might 
be more productive to focus on the positive, rather than couch your 
achievements in terms of the alleged failures of others. Tell us about 
the problems solved by what you've built, the happy users, the increased 
productivity; don't waste your time telling us that we've not thought 
about user-created metadata, about non-XHTML HTML, user-controlled 
metadata, sub-page granularity annotations, or how static and passive we 
all are here. It comes across as laughably false flamebait, when I'm 
sure really you're just proud of what you've been working on and haven't 
dug deeply enough into the work of others in the Semantic Web community 
and related areas. Web 2.0 is fun stuff, as are microformats, Topic 
Maps, Web Services, XMPP, ... This is a community of technology 
pluralists, not fundamentalists. I'm sorry if we've given you the 
impression we're so clueless, but really the best way to propose a 
collaborative way forward is *not* by showing up ten years late telling 
everyone how they've been doing it wrong. So I'm going to ignore the 
rest of your mail for now, maybe others will send you some URLs to check 
out.

cheers,

Dan
> The series starts here:
>
> http://web.mac.com/altmobile/altmobile_blog/ALT_Mobile_Blog/Entries/2008/3/27_Semantic_Web%3A_A_Modern_Implementation.html 
>
>
>
> Here are the major concepts of the <alt> Semantic Web implementation:
>
> 1. We enable user authored and maintained meta data and the 
> traditional Semantic Web prescribed implementation supports publisher 
> defined meta data.
>
> Semantic Web: Publishers vs. Consumers
> http://web.mac.com/altmobile/altmobile_blog/ALT_Mobile_Blog/Entries/2008/3/27_Semantic_Web%3A_Publishers_vs._Consumers.html 
>
>
>
> 2. We enable HTML pages to be described with meta data and the 
> traditional Semantic Web prescribed implementation focuses on XHTML 
> documents.
>
> Semantic Web: Publishers vs. Consumers
> http://web.mac.com/altmobile/altmobile_blog/ALT_Mobile_Blog/Entries/2008/3/27_Semantic_Web%3A_Publishers_vs._Consumers.html 
>
>
>
> 3. We enable user control of their own meta data thereby empowering 
> users and the traditional Semantic Web prescribed implementation 
> empowers web site owners.
>
> Semantic Web: Revenues vs. Empowerment
> http://web.mac.com/altmobile/altmobile_blog/ALT_Mobile_Blog/Entries/2008/3/28_Semantic_Web%3A_Revenues_vs._Empowerment.html 
>
>
>
> 4. We enable users to describe specific HTML content and the 
> traditional Semantic Web prescribed implementation enables publishers 
> to describe the whole document.
>
> Semantic Web: Documents vs. Elements
> http://web.mac.com/altmobile/altmobile_blog/ALT_Mobile_Blog/Entries/2008/3/28_Semantic_Web%3A_Documents_vs._Elements.html 
>
>
>
> 5. We implement meta data that is dynamic, versional, extensible, 
> verifiable, executable, and shareable while the traditional Semantic 
> Web prescribed meta data implementation is static and passive.
>
> Semantic Web: Triple vs. Grand Slam
> http://web.mac.com/altmobile/altmobile_blog/ALT_Mobile_Blog/Entries/2008/3/30_Semantic_Web%3A_Triple_vs._Grand_Slam.html 
>
>
>
> And the series concludes with the post:
>
> Semantic Web: W3C vs. WWW
> http://web.mac.com/altmobile/altmobile_blog/ALT_Mobile_Blog/Entries/2008/4/4_Semantic_Web%3A_W3C_vs._WWW.html 
>
>
>
>
> In light of our implementation, I --and I believe many of my 
> colleagues in the Web 2.0 world-- would like to propose working on 2 
> fronts:
>
> A. A reevaluation of the traditional Semantic Web prescribed 
> implementation by adopting the user-centered focus established in Web 2.0
> B. Assuming a lack of flexibility to update the W3C Semantic Web 
> standards; working with us to ensure that our meta data is usable to 
> upstream technologies such as ontologies, RDF databases, and SPARQL 
> queries.
>
>
>
> Thank you.
>
>
> --Zaid
>
> ALT Mobile
>
> http://altmobile.com/Home.html (web site)
> http://web.mac.com/altmobile (official blog)
>
>
>
>
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 8 April 2008 07:54:20 UTC