Fwd: Re: Re: Re: Re: word for the day

I typed this in as a personal email, but just realised the positive aspects,
think it's shareable. Conversation with a regular Web-developer friend.

A:

>  you really are going to have to explain the semantic web to me properly
> while you are here.  I will try and do some background reading beforehand
> but can't promise - dead busy at the moment.
>

D:
Calling this stuff "Semantic Web" was a very bad PR move, naughty academics.
All you need to know is, it's just using the Web to talk about real-world
things in computer-friendly language. Same as you have in your MySQL
databases. but linked. HTTP is a very versatile protocol (thanks Sir Tim!) -
given a data language (RDF) you can do all the goodness that HTML offers,
but shifting from the document domain to anything you want. Most folks say
it'll take another 10 years to kick in, but recently both the uk and us
governments have taken notice - that 10 years is probably very soon here.

The big challenge at the moment is creating stuff that works for the end
user - say you went to the trouble of expressing everything that anyone
knows about cheese on the Web. How would the potential customers use that?
Coders like you, innit..

I do think the bridge has been crossed though - by putting such information
out, it'll now get consumed and used by all leading search engines, putting
your cheese ahead of the field.

This stuff has had no end of crit - starting with it being Tim's science
project for school (yeah but who else in recent times created something like
the Web - and got a knighthood for his trouble) . But if you look at it a
bit, it's a very natural evolution - just going from a Web of domcuments to
a Web of data. It works.

Then you get onto the syntax. That's an arse. But no worse than e.g. ASP.

Ranting over, I better go bo-bos. Sasha's giving me a very strange look.

Love,
Danny.


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http://danny.ayers.name