Re: Cursors face defining moments on the Web

Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com> wrote:

> P.S. Speaking of encyclopedias, it seems that FSF has
> embarked on an "open encyclopedia" at www.nupedia.org.
> In the W3C Architecture Note on Extensible languages [2]
> is a reference to an interesting paper [3] that discussed
> the idea that "Britannica" and other encyclopedias get
> their value from how "authoritative" they are and that
> the ideal example of a non-authoritative, open encyclopedia
> is the WWW itself (presumably with search engines/directories).
> So I am wondering exactly what space nupedia is hoping
> to occupy.  Oh well...

The benefit of Nupedia is that it is free (libre). Thus people are allowed
to modify, translate, copy and sell Nupedia articles without having to worry
about copyrights.

Nupedia also has an extensive peer review process to help verify articles.

(swinging back around to RDF) Interestingly, the project has been discussing
ways of cataloging articles without forcing a cataloging system upon the
dictionary. They want a system that will allow them to classify any article
independently of the article itself, and to use any classification system
they wish. 

Then they wanted away to provide data inside Nupedia articles, so that
outside processors could answer queries based on the data in the database.
This was dismissed as being too far out.

Sound like a certain RDF to you too?

-- 
[ Aaron Swartz | me@aaronsw.com | http://www.aaronsw.com ]

Received on Wednesday, 31 January 2001 08:45:02 UTC