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On Wednesday 13 February 2002 16:56, Dare Obasanjo wrote:
> This semantic web that you describe reminds me of all the hype about how
> XML would make search engines smarter because it allowed people to add
> metadata to words in documents.
Yep!
> However, no one explained how the author
> of the document would know to tag all data in the document in a manner
> that would satisfy all search engines. For instance, a search for "Dare
> Obasanjo" could be looking for me in many contexts, it could be
> searching for Dare the former teaching assistant at GA Tech, Dare the
> poster to XML-DEV, Dare the Microsoft employee, or Dare the author of
> articles that have appeared in various places online. So now is the onus
> on me to tag my name with all the aforementioned metadata and more
> whenever I enter information about myself?
Personally, I'd do something like defining a nice namespace with some special
attributes and elements in it that could be inserted into documents in such a
way that processors not interested in those elements just ignore them (as is
done in RDDL embedded in XHTML), such as:
<html xmlns:semweb="...">
<semweb:relate type="urn:standard-relations:like-enjoy-affection">
<p>Alaric likes cats</p>
<semweb:object>
mailto:alaric@alaric-snell.com
</semweb:object>
<semweb:object>
urn:standard-group-nouns:living/feline/domesticated
</semweb:object>
</semweb:relate>
</html>
Those libraries of common concepts in a nice convenient set of URN namespaces
is pretty crucial to making the thing hang together.
The existence of XHTML (the <p> element) inside the semweb:relate can be used
by intelligent software to present a comment or annotation for this
relationship. It also seems logical to associate the informal English
specification of the relationship with the formal one.
Such a relation could also be embedded around some SVG that happened to draw
an arrow between two objects. The objects themselves could be embedded in
<semweb:represents object="..."> elements, where the '...' is the URN of the
actual object represented by that SVG shape... imagine the above assertion
about me and cats expressed as an ER diagram.
ABS
--
Alaric B. Snell
http://www.alaric-snell.com/ http://RFC.net/ http://www.warhead.org.uk/
Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software
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