... will - or should - be the name of a loose regular meetup in Innsbruck, bringing together some people interested in the concept of "Semantic Web" in the no-man's-land between technological insiders (doing, say, RDF), highly skilled technologists working on semantic interfaces between humans and computers, and those who come from the humanities side, like myself.
This is a fragment I can use for preparation (via langreiter, my del.icio.us link collections here and here):
"One is that the Semantic Web is in for a lot of heartbreak. It has been trying for five years to convince the world to use it. It actually has a point. XML is supposed to be self-describing so that loosely coupled works. If you require a shared secret on both sides, then I?d argue the system isn?t loosely coupled, even if the only shared secret is a schema. What?s more, XML itself has three serious weaknesses in this regard ...
It doesn?t handle links. The world is not one giant tree that can be freeze-dried and put into text. You have to break it up into chunks. And one man?s chunk is another man?s set of chunks. The way to deal with this is self-describing links, which could, optionally, show you the MIME type and/or purpose of the link as in and/or a self-describing syntax for what the server ?thinks? is chunks (see point 3 below).
XML documents tend to be monolithic. Given a purchase order, for example, and the desire to insert a line item or replace the address, it is very hard to know how, since the items don?t contain IDs or the date they were last created/updated. ... This [doesn't let] people ?chunk? the information while they still have the ability to assemble it.
... All of this has profound implications for databases. Today databases violate essentially every lesson we have learned from the Web. ... It is time that the database vendors stepped up to the plate and started to support a native RSS 2.0/Atom protocol and wire format; a simple way to ask very general queries; a way to model data that encompasses trees and arbitrary graphs in ways that humans think about them; far more fluid schemas that don?t require complex joins to model variations on a theme about anything from products to people to places ..."
(Adam Bosworth/Google, Learning from THE WEB)
Posted by martin at November 3, 2005 2:17 PM | TrackBack