- From: Sean B. Palmer <sean@mysterylights.com>
- Date: Fri, 18 May 2001 00:38:44 +0100
- To: "pat hayes" <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>, "Stefan Decker" <stefan@db.stanford.edu>
- Cc: <www-rdf-logic@w3.org>
> my understanding was always that this is something we (RDF, > Semantic Web folks) DON'T want to do (building a globally > coherent ontology). I agree that this is something that we don't necessarily want to set out as a goal, because if we do, we'll almost certainly fail. But on the other hand, if you have lots of small ontologies shared in the Web, and you have loads of tools that process them, and then you have complex tools that let you transform from one to the other, then you might end up doing something a bit like that. Perhaps. CWM already does it, but it does it for one format, N3, and it's a closed world, and it has loads of bugs. But it gives me hope because it shows that Webized information is easy to repurpose, at least on a small scale. Once we have more robust tools, then we'll probably be able to tell. In the meantime, we'll go on building the pedantic web, and undoubtedly some areas will get messed up - there's always going to be fragmentation. But there's always going to be pockets that work, and that's all that matters. I think the difference is in how far people are setting their sights - many want this to be a solution to all the engineering nightmares of the past 50/100/1000 years... but others just want something to plan their meetings based on several different languages (hereafter referred to as the "Connolly Test"). -- Kindest Regards, Sean B. Palmer @prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> . :Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .
Received on Thursday, 17 May 2001 19:38:24 UTC