- From: Ora Lassila <daml@lassila.org>
- Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 06:52:41 -0500
- To: www-webont-wg@w3.org
Folks, after being told in yesterday's teleconference that my use case [1] can be likened to wanting to eliminate hunger from the world I feel I should explain why I chose it and why it may not, after all, represent naïve idealism. Naturally I have to apologize for choosing a research-oriented problem. I acknolwedge that not everyone here represents a research organization and may have more practical, short-term goals. Some of us, however, are in this working group because it has become the frontier in trying to realize the vision of the Semantic Web (those not interested in this can stop reading this message now :-). The Semantic Web is a *hard* problem. Why? Because many of our simpler examples can be solved using other means - no RDF, DAML+OIL, reasoning etc. is required (this is anyway the response I get when trying to explain what the Semantic Web is about, and I have been trying for the past 5 years or so). Any reasonable number of information systems can be made to interoperate and exchange information by employing a group of clever XSLT and Perl programmers, it seems. And people will do this, and will extend this approach to Web Services as well. What we are trying to do is qualitatively harder. The problem is that it cannot be demonstrated or illustrated using simple scenarios. I believe we want to make a solid case that the Semantic Web makes sense; otherwise we will always be faced with the folks who would rather believe in the "XSLT magic". As for the "uncoreographed" interoperability of some systems (virtual or physical), a reasonably powerful *standardized* representation language would be a big win, allowing us to expose (some of) the semantics of the systems in question and making it more likely a reasonable response can be generated in unanticipated situations. Comments? Regards, - Ora [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2001Dec/0022.html -- Ora Lassila mailto:daml@lassila.org http://www.lassila.org/ Research Fellow, Nokia Research Center
Received on Friday, 14 December 2001 06:52:45 UTC