- From: Dan Brickley <Daniel.Brickley@bristol.ac.uk>
- Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 21:26:15 +0100 (BST)
- To: "Sean B. Palmer" <sean@mysterylights.com>
- cc: Sampo Syreeni <decoy@iki.fi>, William Loughborough <love26@gorge.net>, RDF interest group <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>
On Fri, 25 May 2001, Sean B. Palmer wrote: > > I think that sort of thing qualifies as Them, so in fact > > they *are* in control. > > But these kind of "standards" will no longer be necessary with the > Semantic Web. This particular endeavour is looking to produce a > standard, so for example, all database entires under "Amino_Acid" will > mean a certain standard thing. What the SW enables you to say is that > "Amino" in my particular database system is equal to your "Amino_Acid" > column, so as long as you spot the relationships, there's no need for > some centralized root of the ontology tree. Just make it up as you go > along, and use the inferences. > > We can already make this Semantic Web inference type stuff work on a > demonstration level - it shouldn't be long before there are tools that > can handle this on a day-to-day industrial strength basis. That's what they said in the 1970s about AI. (By the year 2001 we were supposed to be served by robotic slaves who could read books by flicking through them...) Let's not encourage needless representational heterogeneity on the promise of a technology that we're not yet entirely sure how to scale... Sure, we can do mappings etc., but if we can avoid doing mappings through not diverging in the 1st place, even better! Dan -- Semantic Web Modesty Front
Received on Friday, 25 May 2001 16:27:33 UTC