xml-dev - Re: Academia needed the Web (Re: Success factors for the Web andSemantic

[Paul Tchistopolskii <paul@qub.com>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: David Megginson <david@megginson.com>

> courseware; as a medievalist, however, I had had it drilled into me
> that low-quality/high-volume *always* wins (i.e. crowded school and
> chancery scripts over elegant monastic scripts, paper over parchment,
> printing over calligraphy, American culture over ... oops, sorry), 

Yes. 'Worse is better' always wins. That's why for searching and ranking - 
<meta> and markup should be slaves of Google / screen scrapping, but not 
the other way. <meta> is for "high quality search" .  he-he.

My experience shows me that even I like the idea of XSA, 
it is becomes too hard for me to maintain even tiny xsa.xml...  

No talking about writing some RDF/ Topic maps or something. 
Should I write those huge RDF / Topic maps constructions by hand ? 
I'm too lasy for that.

Do I understand right that The Semantic Web will provide me with 
the quality of search better than Google provides, but in return I 
should spend more time maintaining my documents ?

If this is the only sound advantage of Semantic Web - I think it is 
obvious that your pattern could be applied here.

Google / screen-scrapping is 'worse is better'. 
It is 'low-quality/high-volume'. 

Following your rule - Google should win.

Rgds.Paul.

PS. If SW is a layer on *top* of searching layer - that could be 
interesting, but I don't understand how 'ontology', Topic Maps , 
RDF, Namespaces, URIs and other nice things could be layered 
on top of Google / screen-scrapping.