Re: .htaccess a major bottleneck to Semantic Web adoption

Mark,

> And everyone knows at least one way to publish HTML, don't they?

I disagree. Most people know how to enter text into a form, but they  
have no clue what HTML is all about, how it comes that one line of  
text is bigger while the other is smaller, how backlinks and  
permalinks are created and resolved, and so on.

The difference between publishing HTML and RDF (in whatever form) is  
exactly the difference between the Web and the Semantic Web: the  
former is "just" human-readable material, while the latter is machine- 
interpretable. Just as one needs to know the grammar and vocabulary of  
English in order to publish a proper textual description of goods, one  
needs at least basic understanding of the grammar and vocabularies of  
the Semantic Web to publish proper RDF data about these goods.

Even if blogs, CMS, and whatever other tools there are support the  
user in authoring RDFa with a nice GUI, it will be still up to the  
user to correctly select property URIs and to properly format literal  
values so that they can be used by a generic (!) RDF client.

Alternative: tools that do some sort of NLP / Entity Recognition /  
Information Extraction become so mature that they can be reliably  
deployed into mainstream blogs, CMS, wikis, ...

By the way, the same applies to the client side: in terms of  
applications we must get beyond the tabular rendering of RDF data.  
This is nice, but in the end it provides not much more value to an end  
user than a nicely formatted HTML page. The things that Google and  
Yahoo do are a good step in this direction.

Best,
Bernahrd

Received on Friday, 26 June 2009 07:50:17 UTC