xml-dev - RE: RDF, the "semantic web", and the nadir of AI (was RE: Realistic prop

[Robin Berjon <robin@knowscape.com>]

At 11:40 18/10/2000 -0400, Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote:
>> Right now if you are reading information on the web and want
>> access say to related information you have to rely on the
>> source to provide with links, or you need to use external
>> ad hoc applications (for instance search engines). Both are
>> fairly crude ways of relating information, and neither
>> really attaches meaning to their targets. RDF, Topic Maps and XLink may
>> have different use cases, but they can already be used to better
>> what we have.
>
>Of course... though RDF, Topic Maps and XLink all don't *really*
>assign meaning to anything though. I should note that between
>using <meta> and reverse inference for clustering, clustering
>accuracy can be improved tremendously such that "what's related"
>as a search isn't too bad. There was a paper on this at one of
>the WWW conferences.

Yes, and that's the only part I have found interesting while reading papers
on the semantic web. Create a much denser graph with edges that are of a
different nature than those presently existing/obvious, or help their
creation. Providing that means more/better possibilities for interrelating
atoms of information. What can be built on top of that is open to
conjecture. I don't think it's a silver bullet, I don't even understand how
it could claim to be. It's just an improvement that some of us may find
interesting.

Perhaps no new application will come out of it, simply more accurate
versions what already exists. I think that making the web ever so slightly
better is a Good Thing. The hype doesn't matter, though it's a convenient
way of achieving critical mass.

>> But the binding step isn't that hard to make. If you create a language
>> within a namespace and bind semantics to its elements, then you could
>> describe those semantics (for instance in RDF) and make them available
>> either as linked from the document instances, or in some sort of
>> repository. It's one (big) step better than relying on the actual name of
>> the element, it provides context.
>
>The problem is that there is a "then the magic happens" step here.
>There is *no* standard way of defining the semantics in a way that
>is globally interpretable, let alone a standard way of binding them
>to a namespace. Even if there were it doesn't solve the semantic
>evolution problem.

Sorry for being unclear, I wasn't implying that the above would help build
the semantic web on a global scale. That would be trusting people to use
<addr> for addresses instead of <font><blink>I live here... In it's most
minimalist form it could be simple way to document a language (for humans)
and perhaps a little more within restricted domains. Agreed, that's not
much, at best a convenience. But I haven't heard anyone suggest anything
that promised much more and appeared to be doable. Maybe starting from
those small improvements, someone will come up with a greater idea.



-- robin b.
Those of you who think you know everything are very annoying to those of us
who do.