- From: Frank Manola <fmanola@mitre.org>
- Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 11:14:59 -0400
- To: Aaron Swartz <aswartz@upclink.com>
- CC: RDF Core <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
Aaron-- This is a useful contribution IMO; it flows nicely, and the various pieces hang together well (more than can be said about a lot of Semantic Web material!). I think one of the points you make that needs more emphasis and development, not in your paper, but in our thinking about the RDF/DAML/Semantic Web context, is the part about giving something a URI, and then creating a Web page to describe it. This is related to our general discussions about the appropriate definition of "resource", and the relationship of "data stuff" to "real stuff", but more than that, I think we want to encourage the use of the Web as a readily accessible source of metadata about things, and working out this connection between URIs, the things they denote, and associated Web information (and at the same time keeping the differences straight) is important in making that happen. A few quibbles: 1. In the XML section, you emphasize that "each program is free to interpret the markup in the way that's best for it." That's certainly true (and in practice there really isn't anything we can do about it even if we wanted to!), but in your example the programs do interpret the "emphasized" markup consistently with the semantics of "emphasis", even though that emphasis is expressed differently in the specific results they produce (bold display versus louder reading). We wouldn't have thought it very good if one of the programs interpreted the "emphasized" markup by whispering the indicated words, even though it would have been free to do that. One of the purposes of the Semantic Web is to be able to convey this sort of semantic information, and this idea could be developed a bit, possibly using this example. 2. Another theme that needs a lot of development in our primer is dealing with the "why not just use XML" argument (you mention that "RDF gives you a way to make statements that are machine-processable", but of course XML is machine-processable too, so we need to develop that idea more specifically). 3. "...a vast influx of newbies from AOL..." Restrain yourself! :-) 4. "While it's very difficult to create these proofs...it's very easy to check them." I keep hearing people say this, and I understand the difference between creating the proof and checking it, but it seems to me that checking the proof requires that I share and understand the rules of inference used by the creator. I.e., when the proof says, "given A and B, C follows", I (or my software) must know enough to be able to agree or disagree. So a little more detail about the assumptions would be helpful here. --Frank Aaron Swartz wrote: > > One possible starting point for our work on the primer might be > this document I've put together: > > http://logicerror.com/semanticWeb-long > -- Frank Manola The MITRE Corporation 202 Burlington Road, MS A345 Bedford, MA 01730-1420 mailto:fmanola@mitre.org voice: 781-271-8147 FAX: 781-271-8752
Received on Wednesday, 19 September 2001 11:15:47 UTC