xml-dev - Re: Success factors for the Web and Semantic Web

[Robin Berjon <robin@knowscape.com>]

At 23:32 21/12/2000 +0000, Sean B. Palmer wrote:
>Of course! Not by any means. In fact I asked people to each come up with
>ten uses of the SW they'd like to see. Could you give me your 10?

That's why I think Uche is right when he says that there probably wasn't a
"real" need for the www when it was created. The thing was there, some
people started having ideas on how to use it, and only then did the true
need arise. Yes it does make a lot of things easier/better, but I'm not
sure many of those needs were formulated _before_ something was made of it.

I'm not an early adopter, I started creating www content around 94. But
even "back" then people asked me "what is this for ? Does it have any
practical use ? It just seems like yet another pointless geeky habit. At
best you can talk between geeks, but you won't ever get enough people on
that to make it truly interesting" (that was in France, which was a little
late in coming to the www, maybe others here knew that same situation a
year earlier).

I honestly don't know if and what the SW could bring. I certainly couldn't
list ten things that it could do for me (though I'd be interested in
listening to anyone trying to). But it's one of several fairly new things
that could become interesting when (and if) someone finds a truly useful
application for the idea.

-- robin b.
Design a system that even an idiot will be able to use, and only an idiot
will want to use it.