Re: More On the Semantic Web (or: is RDF any good?)

Matt Jensen wrote:

> There were many people in the 80's working on hypermedia systems, and a
> significant reason that they stalled and the WWW took off is that they
> cared about ensuring consistency, bidirectional links, etc., and Tim was
> willing to let go of that.  The result is >1 billion WWW pages, and
> probably >10 billion links.  A small percentage of the pages are broken,
> but on the whole the WWW provides tremendous value.

Thanks for saying that, it needed saying!   I think RDF is in danger of
becoming still born for this very reason.  There is a trade off between
precision of expression and growth and acceptance.  The more precise and
logically consistent we insist upon RDF validations, the more difficult we
make implementations, and the less likely anyone will use them.   This thing
should unfold like an onion, with the outer shells being super simple and
robust and the inner shells being rich and complex. But we'll never survive
long enough to get to that rich inner core unless the outer shells gain wide
acceptance.

<signature format="mime/topic">
topic: Seth Russell
testing: mime/topic
authorOf: http://RobustAi.Net/Ai/SymKnow.htm

topic: mime/topic
descritpion: A simple syntax for expression of labeled directed graphs
</signature>

Received on Monday, 6 November 2000 16:00:06 UTC