- From: William Grosso <grosso@SMI.Stanford.EDU>
- Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 10:00:40 -0800
- To: Greg FitzPatrick <gf@medianet.org>
- CC: xml-dev@xml.org, www-rdf-interest@w3.org
Good morning, Greg FitzPatrick wrote: > > <William:plug for = "Protoge-2000"> > <Greg:rebuttal> > At the risk of being thought contentious, I don't think that was a rebuttal :-) Instead, I think we're talking about lots of different issues under the same subject header. At least part of this thread has been about learning curve issues. Quotes include: > However the RDF spec. is particularly obtuse, and every > time i have to write something on RDF my heart sinks, and > It took me much much longer than a week to "get" RDF.... > Now the bad news. The specs take you only so far in learning > the powers and pitfalls. The examples floating around out > there are not terribly elucidating. And the publicly available > tools are barely functional or out-and-out broken. Protege directly addresses this issue. You can use Protege to create models, you can play with the example knowledge-bases that come with the download, you can even (should you desire to read pure XML syntax, look at the generated RDF files). Learning to model inevitably involves building models and Protege-2000 vastly simplifies that task. That was my point-- Protege-2000 is a set of modeling tools, built for frame-based languages very similar to RDF (and then adapted to RDF). It grew out of the need for better modeling and knowledge acquisition tools and it explicitly addresses the problems mentioned above. What's more, Protege-2000, since it is open-source, written in Java, built in a very modular fashion (e.g., Protege components can be embedded in applications, or additional objects can easily be added to Protege), comes with both examples and documentation, etcetera etcetera, provides an excellent starting point for people to begin thinking about applications using RDF. What's more (and the reason for the plug in the first place)-- we're serious about the open-source stuff. I'd be thrilled for people to download Protege-2000, try to use it, and then say "You know. It's a nice try but it doesn't work for what I need to do because [good reason]." I'd be even more thrilled if the sentence continued " ... but then I thought about it some more and I realized that the following piece of code fixes the problem." Jumping out a little bit: there may also be deeper issues being brought up in this thread. For example, I don't quite get the following paragraph: > On the other hand there is something unsettling about > your solution to the "difficulties" being discussed. I > know I was sloppy quoting someone offhand like that and I am > working in the background in order to get an "official" > comment from that person, but we were talking about understanding; > > understanding in order to implement > and not > implementing in order to circumvent understanding I'm not really sure what's meant here. Not only am I unclear on what "implementing RDF" means, it's not at all obvious to me that allowing people to ignore the syntax and focus on the real task (building abstract models) is "circumventing understanding." William Grosso -- William Grosso grosso@smi.stanford.edu Phone 650-498-4255 http://www.smi.stanford.edu/people/grosso/
Received on Wednesday, 23 February 2000 13:01:30 UTC