Trusting the Semantic Web: Facts and Points of View

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

A Semantic Web of assertion databases can easily be a superstitious or gamed
system.
How?  Well, what does it let us do with citation databases that are opinions
or points of view?

<pointOfView>"...on this historical note, I would gently propose that XML
started in May 1994 at CERN, when a breakout group
debated where HTML might be headed, and in particular
how to handle  domains such as  Maths and Chemistry."</pointOfView>

<pointOfView>The founder of XML-Dev is the founder and moderator of
comp-text-sgml.</pointOfView>

Would facts enable us to assign analogical credibility to the statements
above? 

<fact>Bill Tunnicliffe was the first to propose markup (late 1960s).</fact> 
<fact>XML is a subset of SGML developed some years after ISO 8879
(1986).</fact>
<fact>Discussions and working examples of content-oriented markup 
predate MathML, CML, (See MIL-M-28001, 87269, and others)</fact>
<fact>Discussions and examples of using content-oriented markup for 
hypertext predate the CERN meeting cited.  See US Navy Work Package 
DTDs and others.</fact>

It is hard to determine if XML started at the meeting cited 
but not hard to assign a low credibility factor to that being 
original thinking at the time.  Influential?  Can't say.  No facts. 
One would have to give XML a separate historical context which 
would distort history.

<fact>CTS predates XML-Dev.</fact>
<fact>CTS and XML-Dev have markup topics.</fact>
<fact>The origin of most early XML-Dev topics are comp-text-sgml
topics.</fact>

It isn't hard to make a case even with interpretation that  
Peter and Henry did host XML-Dev originally. Yet if the topics continued the

discussions on CTS, what exactly did they found?  While we may 
be able to determine the truth of a given fact, how we reason with that, 
what we conclude, can vary by the goal of the interpretation.  

We say "let a thousand flowers bloom" but when that becomes inconvenient, 
someone will be pruning the fact base.

Len
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h