RE: What do the ontologists want

Pat Hayes:
My point is only that
there are off-the-shelf solutions to some of these technical problems
available if people are willing to go and look on the shelves. But as
we have seen, lots of people apparently aren't.

Reply:

Can you post links to some of them? I'm honestly curious.

My concern is that I don't want to endure another round of browser wars. I
build web sites for a living. I estimate that probably a third of my time is
wasted trying to ensure cross-browser compatibility or trying to work around
the limitations of the current crop of browsers.

I have nothing against off-the-shelf products, but I like the idea of either
one standard or multiple standards that interoperate. The W3C seems like a
good place to centralize things. So RDF (and the Semantic Web concept)
intrigue me. But we seem mired in argument between two (or more) groups who
aren't speaking the same language. To a disinterested party like me, this
sounds like: Yes it does. No it doesn't. Yes it does. No it doesn't. Yes, it
really does. No, it really doesn't.

I'm certainly learning a lot, but I'm not sure we're getting anywhere. Am I
the only person on this list who's a bit exasperated? I doubt it. So I
reiterate: can we at least decide what everyone agrees on, separate that out
so it can be used, and then perhaps set up a separate list to argue the
remaining issues? I'd subscribe (as a lurker). But I'd really like to know
what--specifically--*isn't* disputed.

Can anyone enlighten me?

Thanks,
Charles F. Munat
Seattle, Washington

Received on Tuesday, 15 May 2001 23:28:38 UTC