Re: Valid representations, canonical representations, and what the SW needs from the Web...

Almost totally agreed w/ Paul on this, but two minor nits --- 
tangential but food for thought.

On Monday, Feb 3, 2003, at 15:55 US/Central, Paul Prescod wrote:

> Those billions of pages are not semantic-web processable or we 
> wouldn't be arguing about how to build the semantic web. They are the 
> things talked ABOUT by the semantic web, not the nodes in the web.
> Because the are 100% semantically ambiguous I would say that they are 
> totally valueless as part of the web.

Paul, you might be overstating the case just a bit.  If *could be* that 
services e.g. Google could perform a useful function in mining and 
making (minimal) semantic information about the existing (non-semantic) 
Web available in a machine-usable fashion.  I.e., to some extent your 
comment about the existing Web being the subject of the semantic Web 
belies your comments about the value of the existing Web.

>  Plus, not that URIs are not expensive. They are cheap. Making new 
> ones is easy. We need to make new ones to have a home for the RDF data 
> anyhow. So what.

I wonder about this.  Google knows about ~ 3B "pages."  I wonder what 
the amortized mean economic cost- and / or value-per-page for all of 
those is, how much money (time, etc.) was sunk in creating them and the 
software and hardware infrastructures that manage / host them...  At 
least one of those quantities (cost) is probably higher than we might 
at first imagine.

jb

Received on Monday, 3 February 2003 17:25:47 UTC