RE: [xml-dev] WSIO vs. Semantic Web - Setting the Record Straight

["Phil Fuhlman" <pfuhlman@Dexma.com>]

Heh, heh, 'Semantic Web'. I like that, sounds like a resturant:

"Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the Semantic Web. My name is Tina, I'll
be your waitress tonight. Would anyone care to start off with a schema?"

"Nah, I want a DTD."

"I'm sorry, we don't serve DTDs anymore, all we have are schemas. But we
do offer both lite and rigorous schemas."

"What? What's the difference."

"Well, our rigorous schemas take about 15 minutes to prepare, while our
lite schemas treat everything as unbounded strings and all elements
having cardinality of 0 to n."

"Wow! You call that 'lite'? More like, 'on the edge' I'd say! Gimme one
of those!"

<sorry - its friday pm...>

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Borden [mailto:jborden@attbi.com]
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2002 2:15 PM
To: Bullard, Claude L (Len); 'Joshua Allen'; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] WSIO vs. Semantic Web - Setting the Record
Straight


Len,

>
> As to the Semantic Web, it is irrelevant to me at this time.  Why
> do I say that?  I am a Microsoft Thrall.  From a purely
> practical perspective, what I need to do know comes from the
> MSDN.  The Jan 2001 MSDN provides a set of baseline specifications
> and the specs proposed for the Global Web Services.  RDF is
> never mentioned.  RDDL is never mentioned.

As smart as the MSDN folks are, the Jan 2001 MSDN would have had to been
extremely psychic to mention RDDL (which was coined at the beginning of
Jan
2001).

>
> REST may be great guys.  I'm all for it.  But the specs
> the WSIO has before them don't mention it.

I am as yet unsure whether REST is not a more detailed explanation of
HTTP,
or perhaps a description of how best to use HTTP, or a theoretical model
for
HTTP.Do the specs mention HTTP 1.1 ?

>
> Prove me wrong, please.  Otherwise, "The Web" is also
> irrelevant.  What we need from HTML and URIs, we already
> have.  What we need from XML, the WSIO is standardizing.
>

Gag me if you really believe this.

Do you recall "Cairo"? Ever read any in depth discussions of COM
"monikers"?
Cairo got derailed, perhaps as a result of the Web, perhaps it was just
too
ambitious. COM monikers and URIs turn out to have alot in common. In any
case, the fact that Bill Gates was late to see the rise of the "Web" and
the
consequent effort made to turn MS on a dime toward the Web is well known
--
any really smart person or company is not afraid to admit when it has
been
barking up the wrong tree. IBM seems to go wherever the flow takes it
(and
is big enough to follow any and all streams at the same time). Moreover
there is nothing about .NET for example, that requires UDDI (as far as I
can
tell). So what makes you think anyone is really betting the farm on
these
particular collection of "Web Services" specifications?

The fact is that no matter how hard, or with how much money, you try to
mandate what the "Web" is, you are in serious danger of getting
"Googled" --
which in this context does not mean getting indexed, rather it means
what
happend to the commercial value of Altavista, et al.

Jonathan


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