The Semantic Web, And EARL [was: Re: EARL for dummies]

> the idea that the above URIs reveal a schema that somehow
> fully describes this language and that it is so simple (only two
> {count 'em 2} possible "statements"), yet looks like the recipe
> for flying to Mars is a bit daunting. Its very simplicity enables it
> to evaluate and report on just about anything - from document
> through language via guidelines! It is a fundamental tool for the
> Semantic Web in that it gives "power to the people" who can
> say anything about anything.

You ought to carve that on a rock somewhere. These little "pockets" of
SW philosophy are starting to show up all over the place, so it's
clear that the notions behind the coding are stating to become more
pervasive - more accessible.

As for the complexity... it reminds me of when Homer was working on
his tax return, and accidentally proved that God didn't exist. Even
processing small stuff on the CWM scale, you can get unexpected
(sometimes good, sometimes bad) results. For example, I wrote my
little RDF Lint thing, and ran it on a schema that I'd been writing...
the stuff that it outputted had some extrememly important triples that
I wouldn't have spotted in a million years! What was incredible to me
though is that I wrote both the schema, and the parser... and yet my
own invention pointed out something to me. Scary.

With EARL, the actual power of the instances will be very low. In
fact, the system is almost achingly simple - I really can't understand
why it's taking so long for the idea to spread. Maybe it is too
simple. Still, the fact is that, yes, the schema is pretty complex in
parts to someone who has no concept of RDF or the Semantic Web. But
its power will hopefully enable it to convert EARL 0.9 statements into
EARL 0.95, and for machines in the future to make even more
outstanding conclusions based upon it. And the funny thing is, even
the Semantic Web ideals are a total flop, we still have a format that
works just as well as any other data model. We can't lose.

Still, I hold onto the hope that 99% of the Semantic Web "principles"
of evolution, transformation, and inference will be realized. On a
small scale, the assertions aren't actually all that grand... the main
thing needed to go from 0.9 to 0.95 is the following filter (I think -
haven't tested anything yet):-

   { { :x a earl9:TestResult; :y :z } log:implies
       { :x a earl:ResultProperty; :y :z } } log:forAll :x , :y , :z .

It's certainly not long, and not really all that difficult that it
can't be 80% explained to a layman/woman in a few seconds (if I were
Al maybe). One important thing though is that you need to be able to
bootstrap yourself into the Semantic Web - to understand the rules
behind the terms. At the moment, we're severly lacking in terms that
allow people to make inferences - we have DAML equivalentTo and some
of the logic stuff, but we need more if we're going to do this
properly. More primitives, please :-)

Still, it's looking pretty darn good.

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
:Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .

Received on Monday, 14 May 2001 22:38:26 UTC