Re: Yorick Wilks on Semantic Web & httpRange-14

FYI, I found the paper that presumably accompanies the talk:  *The Semantic
Web as the apotheosis of annotation, but what are its semantics?
(2008)<http://staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/Y.Wilks/papers/IEEE.SW.untrak.pdf>
* . I like the fourth view: "if the [Semantic Web] just keeps moving as
an engineering development and is lucky (as the successful scale-up of the
WWW seems to have been luckier, or better designed, than many cynics
expected) then real problems will not arise." It strikes me a truly agile
approach. :)

-- Nick

Nick Gall
Phone: +1.781.608.5871
Other Contact Info: http://profiles.google.com/NickGall/about


On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 1:43 PM, Larry Masinter <masinter@adobe.com> wrote:

> I saw the notice of a talk (abstract below) on the philoweb list. The
> issues raised seem quite related to the difficulties I have had with the
> use of URIs as the means by which assertions expressed in the semantic web
> are grounded in the world so that they become assertions about the real
> world; the difficulty is with " agreed meanings for terms".  These
> difficulties (IMO) underlie the controversies around previous W3C TAG
> "findings" on "the range of HTTP".
>
> Lately, I've been trying to argue that we will make more progress on
> issues of pressing concern around web security, provenance, trust,
> certificates, and other issues, if we move away from talking about
> "meaning" and instead focus a model in which trust, belief, identity,
> persistence are explicit.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Larry
> --
> http://larry.masinter.net
>
>
> ====================
> from https://lists-sop.inria.fr/sympa/arc/philoweb/2012-05/msg00000.html
> ==================
> The Semantic Web: meaning and annotation
> Yorick Wilks
> Florida Institute of Human and Machine Cognition.
>
>
> The lecture discusses what kind of entity the Semantic Web (SW) is, in
> terms of the relationship of natural language structure to knowledge
> representation (KR). It argues that there are three distinct views on the
> issue: first, that the SW is basically a renaming of the traditional AI
> knowledge representation task, with all the problems and challenges of that
> task. If that is the case, as many believe, then there is no particular
> reason to expect progress in this new form of presentation, as all the
> traditional problems of logic and representation reappear and it will be no
> more successful outside the narrow scientific domains where KR seems to
> work even though the formal ontology movement has brought some benefits.
> The paper contains some discussion of the relationship of current SW
> doctrine to representation issues covered by traditional AI, and also
> discusses issues of how far SW proposals are able to deal with difficult
> relationships in parts of concrete science.
>
> Secondly, there is a view that the SW will be the WorldWideWeb with its
> constituent documents annotated so as to yield their content or meaning
> structure more directly. This view of the SW makes natural language
> processing central as the procedural bridge from texts to KR, usually via a
> form of automated Information Extraction. This view is discussed in some
> detail and it is argued that this is in fact the only way of justifying the
> structures used as KR for the SW.
>
> There is a third view, possibly Berners-Lee's own, that the SW is about
> trusted databases as the foundation of a system of web processes and
> services, but it is argued that this ignores the whole history of the web
> as a textual system, and gives no better guarantee of agreed meanings for
> terms than the other two approaches. The lecture also touches on the basic
> issues of how the above viewpoints relate to the basic issue of how
> elements of the SW gain meaning, and the views of Halpin and others are
> discussed. There are also some reflections of the origins of the SW in
> Berners-Lee's own thinking and whether the SW was what he intended all
> along when the WWW was first set up.
>
>