Re: Personal comments on "Providing and Discovering Definitions of URIs"

On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 11:24 AM, Leigh Dodds <leigh.dodds@talis.com> wrote:

> One item that is completely glossed over is that, outside of the
> Semantic Web community, no-one cares about this issue at all.

I will reply to the rest in time but I wanted to get this one thing
clarified. I think by "Semantic Web community" you mean the community
that is currently using RDF and related languages (e.g. OWL). The use
of RDF as a "resource description framework", e.g. use of Dublin Core,
POWDER, and licensing metadata for document indexing, filtering, and
discovery, is substantial and predates the application of RDF to
knowledge representation. It's not what I personally would call
Semantic Web. In fact there seems to be tension between the two
applications of RDF. But the term's not that precise so we can both be
right.

If someone new to RDF doesn't care about interoperability with other
RDF content and tools, I'm not sure what any of us can do to influence
them. Ideally there would be a consensus specification, and we'd
politely invite everyone to design to it, but that doesn't mean they
will, and I'm not sure *any* consensus spec, no matter how well it
anticipated what future needs might be, could prevent that. (We've all
seen this pattern play out.) I think you are saying that maybe some
agreements are less likely than others to incite rebellion by
newcomers, and that this is predictable and should therefore be
criterial?

Thanks
Jonathan

Received on Monday, 27 June 2011 15:44:13 UTC