Re: deliverables?

This issue seems to be a recurring theme on RDF IG, and I suspect that
it will continue to do so as more and more people find out about the
Semantic Web and RDF. The questions are usually of two types:-

a) How will the SW benefit me on application "x".
b) What will the Semantic Web provide everyone?

Before we move onto the main topic raised, I submit that b) is both a
ridiculous question, and more or less impossible to answer at this
stage. I know I constantly use the early WWW as an example, but it's
true - no one could have predicted what the WWW did to the world, and
no one can predict what the SW will do overall. All that we can do is
build it up piece by piece and see what happens. Doesn't stop us
speculating what some possible outcomes will be, but it certainly
won't make any of us correct either.

Still, onto a). At the moment I find that the Semantic Web in general
has provided us with very little, but it has provided us with at least
something. For example, I enjoy playing around with CWM and Notation3,
and many people like tinkering with RDF parsers. Some people have
taken to screen scraping RDF semantics out of XML and then repurposing
them. Others have taken to building repositories of information...
e.g. SWAG, DCMI-Registry, and now the DAML repository.

Occasionally you find people trying to put RDF in XHTML, as per the
recent discussions, and I am hoping that something viable will emerge
from what we have all learned quite soon. Also, the www-rdf-calendar
group has started up, and I expect great things from them at some
point.

The recent release of EARL and it's ramifications on Accessibility and
the SW, not to mention DI (Device Independence) and QA (Quality
Assurance) has shown us that the generic RDF model is enough to allow
people to start thinking about data interoperability. Some of the N3
filtering and query examples have been quite eye-opening, and I can't
wait to see them scaled up into real world situations... indeed, the
first glimpse of that was the DanC Notation3 => XML RDF => XHTML
transformation on the W3C URI schemes page.

So I look forward to "the next thing" rather than "the whole thing",
and I think that many people are already doing this, noticeably people
like DanBri and EricM. I stopped looking for the killer ap for the SW
a long time ago, because, as William told me, "the Semantic Web *is*
the killer ap" :-)

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
:Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .

Received on Tuesday, 1 May 2001 15:38:52 UTC