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

At 10:13 AM -0400 5/24/02, Jeff Heflin wrote:
>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


and, in fact, so does virtually every other approach advocated by 
anyone, anywhere to date -- so instead of looking for THE right 
approach, we're looking for something that supports all these things 
as best as possible
  As I said at the DAML kickoff meeting  -- "On the web, there is no `THE' "
  - JH

>"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
>>  >
>>  >


-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
AV Williams Building, Univ of Maryland		  College Park, MD 20742
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler

Received on Friday, 24 May 2002 13:34:59 UTC