Re: Show me the money - (was Subjects as Literals)

Thanks Frank for a wonderful summary!


Juan Sequeda
+1-575-SEQ-UEDA
www.juansequeda.com


On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 3:31 PM, Frank van Harmelen <
Frank.van.Harmelen@cs.vu.nl> wrote:

> As someone who wasn't at the workshop, but who has been following it
> closely, I'm amazed by the lack of social intelligence in the debate.
>
> Not all the worlds' problems can be solved by writing more specifications,
> and getting Linked Open Data widely adopted is an example.
>
> Yes, there are some useful additions & changes to be made to RDF that have
> real use-cases screaming for them (and people already implementing because
> they need them).
> The top 7 at [1] is a good list of these,
> and for all the other items on that list (including "literals as subjects",
> c'mon!), social intelligence should prevail over technical arguments, no
> matter how correct they are.
>
> I'm in full agreement with Richard Cyganiak, Dan Brickley, Ian Davis,
> Benjamin Nowack and others, summed up by the following quotes from different
> messages in this thread:
>
> Benjamin Nowack <bnowack@semsol.com>
>
>> Our problem is not lack of features (native literal subjects? c'mon!). It
>>> is identifying the individual user stories in our broad community and
>>> marketing respective solution bundles. The RDFa and LOD folks have
>>> demonstrated that this is possible.
>>>
>>
> Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de>
>
>> Quite right.
>>
>> But telling those user stories and marketing the solution bundles is  not
>> something that can realistically be done via the medium of *specs*.
>>
>
> Benjamin Nowack <bnowack@semsol.com>
> > We suffer from spec obesity, badly.
> ..
>
>> RDF "Next Steps" should be all about scoped learning material and
>> deployment. There were several workshop submissions (e.g. by Jeremy, Lee,
>> and Richard) that mentioned this issue, but the workshop outcome seems to be
>> purely technical. Too bad.
>>
>
> Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
>
>> Spend the money on a W3C-license javascript SPARQL engine,
>> or on fixing and documenting and test suiting what's out there
>> already. And whatever's left on rewriting it in Ruby, Scale, Lua ...
>>
>
> Ian Davis <lists@iandavis.com>
>
>> In my opinion the time for this kind of low level
>> change was back in 2000/2001 not after ten years of investment and
>> deployment. Right now the focus is rightly on adoption and fiddling
>> with the fundamentals will scare off the early majority for another 5
>> years.
>>
>
> As much as I admire Pat <phayes@ihmc.us> I couldn't disagree more with
> his:
>
>  But after reading the results of the straw poll [1], part of me
>> wants to completely forget about RDF,  never think about an ontology or a
>> logic ever again.
>>
>
> Pat, you may be technically correct, but I think you are socially
> completely wrong on this one. You/we have to choose between an imperfect
> spec that's on its way to being widely used, or one that shines in splendid
> isolation.
>
> Frank.
>   ----
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2010/06/rdf-work-items/table
>
>
> --
> Frank.van.Harmelen@cs.vu.nl             http://www.cs.vu.nl/~frankh
> Working on the Large Knowledge Collider http://www.LarKC.eu
>
>