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

Jeff Bone wrote:
> 
> 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.

Fair enough. But if the new application is Web-smart (as Google is), 
then there would probably be URIs of the form:

http://www.semgoogle.com/about=http://www.prescod.net

*That* would be the URI for the semantically meaningful information from 
"http://www.prescod.net". And even so, it would be totally ambiguous 
whether it is information about a web page, a person, a company, etc.

>>  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."

Pages are expensive. URIs are cheap. Wasting 3B URIs is not a tragedy 
because I can generate 3B new ones with a ten line Python script. I can 
_even_ give them HTTP representations in roughly ten more lines of code 
(including five lines of RDF cruft;)).

  Paul Prescod

Received on Monday, 3 February 2003 17:37:56 UTC