Re: The future of the 'Semantic Web'

Having been one of those who have driven an RDF application for a while, I support the idea
of a high-level (in the sense of "not nitty-gritty") interest group. RDF is extremely
powerful and extremely hard to explain. Using it of course gets better as there are tools,
but I have found a general need of explaining the ideas behind the semantic web. The AI
people have been crying wolf for so long, nobody listens any more. Demonstrating that it
works (with or without a M.Sc. in CS) should be a high priority. But explaining what to do
and how (e.g. how to create your own RDF schemas, and how to use them with an inference
engine), is almost as important.

I think the important thing is to educate the laymen. Not doing so when the web was new is
a large part of the problems we are having today  - even people who should know better
think, for instance, that there is no way to change the font on a page. We need to avoid a
world where people think there is a limited set of RDF schemas and that you have to
register them somewhere, for instance.

Johan

Received on Monday, 9 October 2000 20:38:15 UTC