Re: [seweb-list] A discussion: Is semantic web an old fashioned idea?Is it bubble, unworthy or an interesting research area - Post your c omments

A short 2 cents.

It's new because we are talking about it - some things may seem old 
fashioned, but of course history is important, and refactoring is what 
people do.

Practicality - some rhetorical questions from attempting to understand 
and implement 'semantic web' tools

- model representation - is it meant to compete with or complement SQL 
and object oriented programming(OOP)?  i.e. do we drop our current 
modelling environments and all think in DL?

- data representation - is it meant to compete with or complement SQL 
and OOP?  - persistence and in memory representation - I'm so used to 
representing my instance of data in an object with getters and setters, 
but now I can use an RDF query language to get the values of properties 
from an instance.  Is this competition between the two models? which 
way do I turn?

- query systems - depends on the above.  If one has a large SQL 
database, do we need to change our modelling environment and our 
instance representation to make use of web ontology languages.  If the 
idea is SQL will become obsolete, then this question becomes obsolete.

- resource discovery - seems like there is little competition here, RSS 
is a splendid example of RDF and resource discovery in an explicit 
sense.  The confusion comes over what it would be to have resource 
discovery and relationships implicit - e.g. I import N ontologies into 
ontology x, what is the practicality of how complete x is at any one 
time, and how sensitive to changes in the ontologies N.

cheers
Matt

Received on Thursday, 17 June 2004 18:27:22 UTC