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

I didn't mean that Verisign handles trust in general (although their
slogan is "The Value of Trust"), but they do handle trust in identity. I
suppose it was a somewhat loose analogy based on the fact that
certification services (to use the term coined by Pat earlier in this
thread) already exist for some aspects of trust, and similar ideas could
be expanded to general trust on the Semantic Web. Something like
Epinions is another approach, which is based on trust in the majority as
opposed to trust in a particular organization. Both forms of trust have
their strengths and weaknesses.

Jeff

"R.V.Guha" wrote:
> 
> 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 10:13:34 UTC