Re: Why do you want to do that?

On Aug 12, 2008, at 11:17 AM, Denny Vrandečić wrote:

> Agreed, I drop this argument. It's really a matter of tools probably,
> since most people won't write RDF and OWL with Notepad anyway... So  
> the
> "normal user" in this case are probably the people writing tools using
> RDF as an exchange standard.
>
> The argument was wrong. It should rather be "Is it practical, helpful
> and/or necessary to stick to the difference between Eagle_class and
> Eagle_individual in order to achieve my goals?" And this, indeed, may
> have very different answers depending on your goals, I am afraid.

The problem I see with having answers depend on goals is that in this  
vision of the Semantic Web the are many goals. If representations are  
to be chosen according to goal, then how is the whole thing supposed  
to hang together?

There is the view of the Semantic Web technology stack as just some  
other technology stack - another J2EE or CORBA, and there is the view  
of the Semantic Web as an entity like the Web. What you say about  
goals is more appropriate for the former. For the latter I would  
suggest that coming to agreement  (and learning how to come to  
agreement) on matters such as this is important.

-Alan

>
> Hopefully not procrastrinating but learning,
> denny
>
> Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
>> On Aug 12, 2008, at 10:48 AM, Denny Vrandečić wrote:
>>
>>> I mean, heck, the normal user hardly understands the difference  
>>> between
>>>
>>> the <strong> and the <b> tag in HTML, and we want him to figure  
>>> out the
>>>
>>> difference between Eagle_class and Eagle_individual?
>>>
>>
>> What is a normal user? If we designed the net so that "normal users"
>> understood details of the protocols and security measures, do you  
>> think
>> that would work?
>>
>> I've never been particularly moved by this sort of argument.
>>
>> -Alan
>>

Received on Tuesday, 12 August 2008 15:27:26 UTC