- From: William Loughborough <love26@gorge.net>
- Date: Tue, 01 May 2001 10:32:29 -0700
- To: "RDF-Interest" <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>
At 10:29 PM 5/1/01 +0600, Danny Ayers wrote:
>What are the (clearly identified) goals?
The clearly identified goals of the power grid had more to do with electric
lighting than the fact that we wouldn't be using our muscles to carry water
up the hill or milk cows. The telegraph (interesting that the first
widespread use of electricity was to transmit information rather than
energy) as a precursor to affecting penmanship or the telephone as forcing
all deaf people into their own community or...
One thing pretty much for sure is that a semantic web (lower case) will be
able to encourage ambient information - as ubiquitous as air and if
information is approximately equal to knowledge and knowledge is power then
there will be some transformations that are well beyond our ability to
predict.
Norbert Wiener didn't project that these tools would be so widely available
but he knew they'd change things. He also said "nor are the best
administrators of large projects likely to be the most fertile originators
of new ideas" and sort of laid out the groundwork for "The Cathedral and
the Bazaar".
Talking about what it (the SW) might do, what problems it might solve, etc.
is less fruitful than realizing that when we create
languages/documents/interactions/+ we must "export the semantics" as in
"write what we mean rather than what we want done with it". When we look
back we might notice that the main obstacle to the Semantic Web has been
the Pedantic Web whose entanglements (especially on lists devoted to it)
sapped the talents of those most able to implement it.
We are all part of a really huge "barnraising" effort and we might as well
get on with it. http://www.barnraising.org is still just a placeholder but
the list barnraising@yahoogroups.com could sure use all the help it can
get. In fact my "barn" is to perfect the tools that are to be used by those
who would raise their barns and connect them with those willing to help in
the cooperative undertaking. I know that most of the people on this
(RDF-IG) list could help and most are willing to, so come on.
--
Love.
ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
Received on Tuesday, 1 May 2001 13:31:26 UTC