Re: Do these folks know about RDF?

Agreed. Re-use of well-known things is still helpful.

Chaals

--- Modesty Front for the Semantic Web

On Fri, 25 May 2001, Dan Brickley wrote:

  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



-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI    fax: +1 617 258 5999
Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)

Received on Friday, 25 May 2001 16:30:35 UTC