- From: pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 19:56:51 -0500
- To: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
- Cc: www-rdf-logic@w3.org
>Pat Hayes: > > The key difference is that global hypertext was a genuinely new > > phenomenon in 1991. Nothing about RDF is new, it's just old ideas > > done badly. > >What's the best work you've seen in the field of massively distributed >anarchic information processing systems (like the Semantic Web is >supposed to be)? "anarchic information processing" is not the name of a field, or even a topic. My own view is that if the semantic web expects to be anarchic, and that this is some new kind of information processing that has not been seen before, then I will just tiptoe away from those who are trying to create this anarchy and get on with something more useful. I grew up in a world that was full of people with vague ideas about how anarchic love-ins were going to change society, and most of those people are now stone cold dead. I prefer to live in the real world. But this idea of 'anarchic information processing' is not what I hear from Tim B-L (who expects the semantic web to support reliable B2B transactions involving lots of $$ changing electronic hands) or Jim Hendler (who expects it to be able to enable software agents to keep track of things like parts recalls on refrigerator condenser coils), or people like Matthew West (of Shell, who wants it to support coherent industrial process ontologies created by international standards organizations) to name just a few. If all you want is anarchy, why not just have people use RSTP (random string transfer protocol)? > What lessons have such systems taken from AI? What >lessons should they have taken? There are no such systems, so how can I answer you? If the people/machines in them want to understand one another well enough to draw conclusions from what one another are saying, then they could learn a lot. But that might not be anarchic enough, maybe? Pat Hayes --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola, FL 32501 (850)202 4440 fax phayes@ai.uwf.edu http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes
Received on Thursday, 17 May 2001 20:56:55 UTC