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

[Dave Winer <dave@userland.com>]

If that's what RDF is going to be used for I'd strongly recommend using the
serialization format in XML-RPC or SOAP. They both work incredibly well, and
are supported in lots of environments and are understandable, very simple
stuff that allows data structures to be exchanged between apps on all
platforms. Something to think about? Dave

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Megginson" <david@megginson.com>
To: "xml-dev" <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
Sent: Friday, December 22, 2000 7:50 AM
Subject: Re: Academia needed the Web (Re: Success factors for the Web
andSemanticWeb)


> 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/