Re: RULE vs MGET

Hi Patrick,

Patrick Stickler writes:
 > 
 > 
 > 
 > I appreciate your point of view, but I think you overexaggerate
 > the feasibility of adoption.
 > 
 > Users may not be competent to write a web server or web browser,
 > but they can choose one implementation over another, based on
 > which provides the most utility or ROI.
 > 

Only if there is a market that satisfies this choice.

 > Furthermore, even though most folks mantaining the content of
 > the web do not understand the underlying infrastructure, they
 > tend to employ experts who do, and who allow them to focus on
 > the creation and management of content, not on the nuts-n-bolts
 > of how that's done.
 > 

The majority of content providing users don't employ experts
directly. Instead they use generic hosting service packages to serve
their content.

 > Yet those of us who actually *do* deal with the nuts-n-bolts
 > of how that is done, and strive to make life easy and maximally
 > productive for those creating and maintaining content, care about
 > things such as genericity, scalability, modularity, flexibililty,
 > extensibility and all kinds of other 'ity's.
 > 

Apologies, but I think you're missing the point. IMHO it's not about
whether a user can write a webserver or even appreciate the technology
- it's about whether he/she is able to use the technology at an
appropriate price.

I've been experimenting with URIQA at work, and I really like it. It's
by far the cleanest solution I've seen to the term description
descovery problem. It works really well in a corporate intranet
environment, and really simplifies the creation of semantic-web
agents. (e.g. we have one that dynamically handles monitoring alert
escalation by discovering foaf SMS phone numbers and email addresses)

But I suspect that, like the original web, the creation of the
'internet' semantic web will be driven not by corporations, but by a
bunch of enthusiastic amateurs experimenting with cool stuff in their
spare time. Thanks to the web, this connected bunch of amateurs is
very much bigger than 10 years ago and represents an opportunity to
bootstrap a SW in a short amount of time (given an appropriately
killer application).

Unfortunately if we can't build tools for this early adopter group to
experiment with using their existing hosting providers, then we can't
tap into this network.  
And that's the problem: I can't build a URIQA CGI solution that
somebody can ftp to their web space to provide descriptions of their
terms.

Cheers,

Phil

Received on Friday, 12 March 2004 09:27:09 UTC