RE: deliverables?

Apart from Williams habit of declaring love to us all I think the majority
of what he says is correct.

I am sorry William but whenever I read one of your emails I get this image
of some mad hippy mormon milking a cyber cow.

We have structural linking methods semantic simply put is content linking
and content relevance.

The more you read though the more you can theorise as said by william
content and relevance is knowledge. Now you could take that also to be
intelligence and maybe it will be some scary Orwelian web monster.
As for when where and how I guess it will be another net thing where it will
creep and then it will snow ball when it hits a critical mass.

The main struggle with semantic is where is the root which is almost a
philosophical question with the nature of it all. Once the highbrows have
that one figured then it's time for one of williams barn dances.


-----Original Message-----
From: www-rdf-interest-request@w3.org
[mailto:www-rdf-interest-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Danny Ayers
Sent: 01 May 2001 17:30
To: RDF-Interest
Cc: Murray.Altheim@eng.sun.com
Subject: deliverables?


I just came across a post from Murray Altheim on the XTM list
(xtm-wg@yahoogroups.com) which strikes me as raising rather a good issue. I
hope he will forgive me for quoting him completely out of context -

"...might anyone actually *define* the "Semantic Web", and I don't mean some
rather vague notion
of adding "knowledge on the web." What real problem(s) are you actually
trying to solve? What possible software do you plan to implement, or
could even conceive of implementing?  I don't know how anyone could
define a set of deliverables very well given the rather ambiguous or
nonexistent requirements. All I've seen so far are vague notions of
metadata and ontologies, technologies that already exist."

I've a feeling the tone of this was rather set by preceding mails (Murray?),
but there's no denying the point that there's a lot of vagueness around. A
semantic cloud even.

Maybe things could be clarified through a survey :

1. What are the problems (clearly defined in black & white) that the SW
system will solve?

2. What are the (clearly identified) goals? (particularly those that have
already been reached or are likely to be reached in the near future)

3. What new (clearly defined) opportunities will be enabled by the SW?

and what about a progress report :

4. Approximately how many web sites are incorporating metadata in a
'Semantic Web' fashion? (by which I mean something a little more than HTML
meta tags - maybe if the figure was quoted for the use of RDF?)

5. How many agents are active in a 'Semantic Web' fashion? (again, something
a little more than a traditional search engine or a non-reasoning feed)

6. How many end users are currently benefitting from the SW?

7. How many will be in a year's time? (5 years?)

8. When will the SW appear in an edition of 'The Road Ahead' as 'what I
planned all along'?

I personally feel that the combination of the metadata/ontologies &
reasoning agents will yield some pretty amazing results, including many that
we haven't even thought of yet, but that is most certainly being vague.


---
Danny Ayers
http://www.isacat.net

Received on Tuesday, 1 May 2001 20:26:43 UTC