- From: Nick Gibbins <nmg@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2004 17:42:34 +0100
- To: Miltiadis Lytras <mdl@eltrun.gr>
- Cc: www-rdf-interest@w3.org, www-annotation@w3.org, acl@opus.cs.columbia.edu, kaw@swi.psy.uva.nl, daml-all@daml.org, ontoweb-list@www1-c703.uibk.ac.at, seweb-list@www1-c703.uibk.ac.at, irlist-editor@acm.org, ontology@fipa.org, ontology@cs.umbc.edu
Miltiadis Lytras wrote:
> 1. In 6 years time with ZERO hype and an insignificant
> amount of funding, the WWW evolved from a couple
> of lonely programmers to Netscape and the essential
> features of what we see on the web today.
> 2. In 6 years (1998 to 2004) with ENORMOUS hype and
> funding, the semantic web has evolved from Tim BL's
> book to a few prototype applications, which are less
> advanced than technologies of the 1970s such as SQL,
> Prolog, and expert systems -- and they're doing it
> with XML, which is far less advanced than LISP,
> which was developed in the 1950s.
While I have some sympathy with his cautious attitude towards the Semantic
Web, Sowa misses the rich history of hypertext systems that the WWW draws
on. A different characterisation of the growth of the Web might be:
1. In 6 years (1989 to 1995) with some hype and not
insignificant EU and US funding, the WWW evolved from
Tim BL's original proposal to a widespread but simple
system which is less advanced in certain ways than
previous hypermedia systems, such as the Hypertext
Editing System, Xanadu, NLS, OWL-Guide and Hypercard
--
Nick Gibbins nmg@ecs.soton.ac.uk
IAM (Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia) tel: +44 (0) 23 80598347
Electronics and Computer Science fax: +44 (0) 23 80592865
University of Southampton
Received on Wednesday, 16 June 2004 12:43:57 UTC