RE: A certain difficulty

It is true that RDF formalises a syntax for something that could have been
done using zillions of other syntaxes. What it provides, by doing this, is a
part of the toolkit available to the web (including XML, namespaces, Xlinks,
etc) that allow machines to read the graph, since they can save people a lot
of time. (After all, the Web as a whole is for the benefit of people. Right?
;-) It doesn't change the topology, it just makes life a little easier for
those of us who can't read documents in Chinese.

Sure we will have "semantic 404's" unless we manage to describe
everything. But it is maximising the "Semantic 200's" that is on offer.

Cheers

Charles McCN

On Wed, 23 Feb 2000, Bill dehOra wrote:

[snip]  
  And what of certain *very* hard problems with regard to a computer's ability
  to handle meaning? RDF does not guarantee shared semantics between computers
  any more than speech acts, frame theories or distributed systems have in the
  past. RDF is for machines not people. 
[snip]
 and  
  
  The web is already a graph, it's the documents that are treelike. I don't
  see how RDF changes the topology of the web.

Received on Wednesday, 23 February 2000 11:43:21 UTC