Re: RDF vs the rest of the world

> Recent Google co-founder Sergey Brin said (in speaking about RDF) "I'd
> rather make progress by having computers understand what humans write,
> than by forcing humans to write in ways computers can understand."[1]
> And that's understandable -- that's Google's business model, and it's
> a very reasonable stance for dealing with many people and many kinds
> of information.

Does this not sound like an oxymoron to you? The reason for the
existence of languages like C++, java, IDL, etc... is only way for
computers to understand what humans write is by forcing humans to write
in ways the computer can understand?

human ---> human-readable ---> compiler ---> machine-readable --->
machine

According to R. Brooks, this kind of thinking is the result of the
flexibility possible through software which is also part of the reason
software is inherently complex. Grady Booch's solution to this was to
simplify the complexity by Object-oriented decomposition through
modeling abstraction with object-oriented analysis (seeing the domain
with an object-oriented view). Of course, this inherently will put
constraints on the domain to properly analyze it, and thus forcing
"humans to write in ways computers can understand."

Google's business model is not the world's object model.

-Leo Przybylski

Received on Monday, 23 September 2002 11:29:48 UTC