- From: John Erickson <olyerickson@gmail.com>
- Date: Mon, 5 Jul 2010 08:14:15 -0400
- To: Jeremy Carroll <jeremy@topquadrant.com>, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>, Yves Raimond <yves.raimond@gmail.com>, Toby Inkster <tai@g5n.co.uk>, David Booth <david@dbooth.org>, nathan@webr3.org, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>, Linked Data community <public-lod@w3.org>, Semantic Web <semantic-web@w3.org>
I greatly respect Jeremy's thoughts, and they may be spot-on in this case, but I urge the community to be cautious about how much weight to give this kind of "pragmatic" economics-driven argument generally as the semantic technology industry grows. Virtually every organization has -- should have! -- increasing "vested interests" in their own unique approach. In many cases, their stakeholders may be better-served by maintaining the status quo; many others will be served by upsetting the collective apple cart. Progress is made collectively by hearing out and sometimes acting on well-reasoned arguments from the other side, even if the implications are changing one's code base! Industry consortia move things that look and smell like standards -- W3C recommendations -- ahead by appealing to the "greater good." Thus I interpret Jeremy's comments as not a call to halt progress; rather, he's simply asking for a strong case be made that the proposed changes would benefit the *community* in a compelling way. He's asking for well-reasoned arguments for change that colleagues around the ecosystem might present to their grumpy, grey-suited, money-grubbing, cigar-smoking management ;) John On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 10:51 PM, Jeremy Carroll <jeremy@topquadrant.com> wrote: > On 7/1/2010 8:44 PM, Pat Hayes wrote: >> >> Jeremy, your argument is perfectly sound from your company's POV, but not >> from a broader perspective. Of course, any change will incur costs by those >> who have based their assumptions upon no change happening > > I was asking for the economic benefit of the change, as opposed to the > elegance benefit. > Personally, I am wholly convinced by the elegance argument - but it will not > convince my management, nor should it. > > I suspect there are several other companies and other open source activities > that have investments that assume literals do not occur in subject position. > > Elegance is not, IMO, a sufficient argument to negate those investments. > (The sort of thing we are talking about, is what sort of display is > appropriate for a subject of a triple - we know that it is not a literal, so > certain code paths, and options are not considered). > > Of course, in an industrial consortium costs to one member maybe justified > by benefits to another - but costs to any member do need to be offset by > some benefit to some member ... I have yet to see much of an argument (Henry > got a small bit of the way), that there are any such benefits (i.e. ones > which have a dollar, euro or yuan value). I have pointed to dollar costs ... > I expect to see some such benefit. I don't think that expectation is > unreasonable, more a boundary that keeps people honest ... and not just > indulging in an intellectual game (he says politely). > > Jeremy > > > > > -- John S. Erickson, Ph.D. http://bitwacker.wordpress.com olyerickson@gmail.com Twitter: @olyerickson
Received on Monday, 5 July 2010 12:14:54 UTC