Re: discussion about Semantic Web realization

Dear all,

I would like to thank you for your comments. This is really impressing. 
I didn't suppose I would receive so much feedback. One guy (the author 
of "Transactional processing") cited once sth like this: "This is really 
not fair that we can buy great books, but we cannot buy time to read them."

I wish I could buy more time. Will need more to read all that stuff.

Maciej

Ioachim Drugus pisze:
> 
> 
>>> We cooperate with Moldova State University, Technological University 
>>> and Economics Academy. They already started work on adding semantic 
>>> technologies to their post-graduates curriculum.
>> Good to know! Are any of these materials online? Even if not in 
>> English, it is good to be able to take a look around such things.
>>
> Nothing is online yet, but I will put something together, including 
> contact info of the teachers participating in this, and will send to 
> you. In Moldova, they speak three languages - Romanian (native), Russian 
> (practically same as native) and English (pretty good) - we can have 
> most of materials in English. I came to IT from Academia, where I did 
> reasearch and taught mathematical logics. So, I know this world pretty 
> good - if you plan ever to help with curricula or something else, would 
> be happy to help.
>> Another suggestion here (and a general one, to all 
>> listmembers/countries) is that arranging for inter-site visits may be 
>> a good way to build up skills and connections that bind the Semantic 
>> Web community together better. A related approach is through events 
>> like workshops and conferences. I think in general outsourcing is 
>> easier when there has been some prior face-to-face contact, or 
>> collaboration/discussion through standards work (such as this list), 
>> opensource toolkits etc.
> We would be happy to host such a meeting in Moldova. From this side we 
> can arrage involvement of
> - Research organizations in Moldova, including the Academy of Sciences 
> (the President of AS candidated for Moldova President, and might 
> candidate again in 2009 - he knows about SW)
> - Moscow University, Russia (I graduated, did doctoral research and 
> taught there for a short time)
> - The members of Government  (they sponsored a conference on 
> e-governement systems recently and we shared about advantages of 
> semantic features above EDI)
> I am sure we can get support from the Government even for a large Forum 
> for ex-Soviet countries (Moldova is an active member of CIS - the 
> successor USSR).
> Let me extend an invitation to W3C members to visit Moldova and 
> SemanticSoft with any other occasion they visit Europe.
>>> Now, I will share two thoughts on Maciej's message, which precisely 
>>> articulates the problems of growth of SW.
>>>
>>> 1. Search engines are not alternative, but complementary to SW. 
>>> Really, SW is about *integration* on the global scale and *building* 
>>> the logical layer of the web, and SE is about *search* in the 
>>> *presentation layer*.  SE and SW live in different spaces - they 
>>> cannot compete.
>>>
>>> 2. I will try to articulate the problem which stay in SW progress 
>>> towards industry and on  how to overcome it.
>>>
>>> SW works only with *descriptions* - SW tools process only 
>>> descriptions. On the other side, we have the classic web, which works 
>>> with *resources* 
>>
>> (I'll read that as "document-like resources"; "resource" in the strict 
>> SW sense simply means "thing", while in other groups it meant 
>> something a bit like "page")
> I meant here "application resources" but I wrote "resources" for 
> shortness. Generally, we try to use terms in strict SW sense. We are 
> waiting for the release of WWWA ontology to be sure on strictness.
>> Sounds like nice work. Do you see any scope for a common 
>> architecture/design with the recently announced Drupal RDF effort? 
>> They again are building RDF/SW descriptions into a system based around 
>> a resource/document repository, eg see 
>> http://groups.drupal.org/node/9010 and 
>> http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/session/rdf-and-semantic-web-drupal
>>
>> There are also some commonalities with OpenLink and Talis's work. 
>> Which is all good: not meant as a criticism. I think we're all 
>> figuring out what shape RDF/SW application software will take; at the 
>> moment the closests we have to interchangable software pieces for RDF 
>> are parsers, databases and SPARQL engines. I'm very interested to see 
>> whether higher level functionality also gets created to shared 
>> interfaces, so implementations could compete on their merits, and 
>> users have improved app portability between them.
> 
> It would be great to cooperate with Drupal RDF effort. Their approach 
> sounds closer to another our project which is not over - "Chameleon". 
> This will be a CMS where you can export/import web content into RDF and 
> send the file to another Chameleon site which will restore it as web 
> content. By web content we mean everything you can see on a site, 
> including the interactive UI controls. Chameleon will be an "empty" 
> site, with an engine behind it, which
> (1) Builds the web content from its RDF description
> (2) Compiles the RDF description from the web content which you build 
> visually, through UI
> You can get first impression of Chameleon if you press Try under 
> SemanticSite on our home page. There is no Help yet, but we tried to 
> make it intuitive enough so that with some guesswork, anybody could 
> build a site, intranet or other web-based application without technical 
> skills (semantical features must be ready by middle summer)
> 
>> BTW looking at http://www.semanticsoft.net/semanticwebtools.html ... I 
>> read "Currently, Semantic Server comes with its own SPARQL processor 
>> which is also visual. The user can draw a diagram of the query - the 
>> tool builds the query and displays it result." ... is this your own 
>> SPARQL implementation, or do you build on top of an existing toolkit?
> This is our own Java implementation of SPARQLversion  June 15 2007.
> Generally, we have our proprietary SW development framework based on 
> conceptual A3 approach. It does not have only the XML part of RDF/XML 
> presentation, which we are using from Jena.
>> cheers,
>> Dan
> 
> Thank you,
> Ioachim
> 
> 
> 
>

Received on Monday, 5 May 2008 07:13:47 UTC