Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 

Semantic Web: The Needle or the Haystack?

ACM News Service: WWW2004 Semantic Web Roundup.  This is an interesting summary of the Semantic Web at a cross-roads.  There is a lot riding on the recently-stabilized RDF and OWL specifications.  The key: "Both boosters and critics of the Semantic Web effort say applications need to get on the ground soon to determine the future of the technology."

I am one who maintains that the Semantic Web is ill-conceived in regard to presumptions about "well-defined meaning" and other naive ideas about ordinary language.  I also find the tools to be interesting and potentially useful, just as I take interest in the computational methods and heuristic procedures that are commonly classified as supporting Artificial Intelligence.  But I have no metaphysical commitment to AI nor to the Semantic Web as broadly presented (with muted caveats).

Paul Ford's 2004-05-26 Roundup for XML.com provides the detailed summary.  There is tantalizing mention of many tools, mostly developed in Java, and a suggestion that

"For the Semantic Web to succeed on the desktop, it may need to leave Java behind; one promising approach might be to focus energies on .NET/Mono implementations; alternately, developers could consider using Mozilla's XUL, particularly given the fact that Mozilla already stores application data in RDF -- 'triples all the way down.' "

I think that is promising, and something to look at for blending into social and collaborative software in support of interoperability and interchange, whether or not the wider sense of Semantic Web is achievable.

See also:

Metadata Coherence, Interchange, Aggregation
I'll Have the Blog Special with Extra Sauce
Steve Gillmor: Tablet as Information Appliance
Wikis for the Rest of Us?
When Did We Ever Keep It Simple?
Why Indeed, Awkward Software?

posted by orcmid at 5/29/2004 09:00:00 AM