Re: A plea against central planning (was: Why not import everything?)

I thought Verisign only handles the issue of identity, not trust in 
general. So, Verisign can tell me that the entity which claims it is 
Microsoft is the same entity that is registered in the state of Delaware 
... It really can't tell me whether all that they say on their site is 
true. For that, I doubt whether certificates are relevant at all. I 
suspect we need to use some thing like Epinions version of the Web of 
Trust to duplicate the peer review process found in the scientific 
community.

 I do agree with your general point about vocabularies from branded 
organizations being useful. DDC from oclc and SNOMED come to mind ... if 
only we could convince them to drop the license fees ...

guha

Jeff Heflin wrote:

>I disagree. Trust on the Web is commonly handled by digital certificate
>authorities such as Verisign. I'm proposing an ontology equivalent to
>such authorities. You can take them with a grain of salt, but they'll
>give many people a nice warm fuzzy. Just to be clear, I did not suggest
>that every ontology would have to be approved by an authority (that
>would certainly go against the nature of the Web). I only meant that
>ontologies designed for mass public use could benefit from being
>certified, because that would give users a comfort level without having
>to double-check that buying into the ontology didn't mean they have to
>give away their first-born.
>
>One other thing, I agree about the danger in staffing such organizations
>entirely with logicians, they would have to include domain experts as
>well.
>
>Jeff
>  
>

Received on Friday, 24 May 2002 01:07:23 UTC