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

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

Paul Tchistopolskii writes:

 > 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 ?

I have no faith in Semantic Web plans -- they sound too much like the
Information-Highway plans that *lost* to the Internet and Web a decade
ago.  I see a role for RDF or something similar on the Web for pure
data, like (say) mutual fund values or GIS information -- stuff that
users plan on processing automatically by machine (and that you would
use delimited text or a spreadsheet file for right now).  In this view
RDF would simply be the data counterpart of HTML rather than a silver
bullet that will enable intelligent searching and machine
understanding.

Putting a data table on a Web site in RDF (or some other data-oriented
XML format) is a lot cheaper and easier than running a CORBA server,
and it will probably even beat out simple protocols like SOAP (since
people can publish personal data on their ISPs without having control
over the server).


All the best,


David

p.s. Even if we did build all of the Semantic Web infrastructure, it
would fail, because site owners would falsify metadata to get higher
search rankings -- if XML searches were popular, all of the porn sites
would claim to be XML sites, etc. etc.

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/