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Today we have the web. Discounting Web Services and the Semantic Web, what
happens next?
What is the third way, Simon?
---
Danny Ayers
<stuff> http://www.isacat.net </stuff>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@simonstl.com]
>Sent: 24 April 2002 23:25
>To: Mike Champion
>Cc: xml-dev
>Subject: Re: [xml-dev] SemWeb again
>
>
>On Wed, 2002-04-24 at 17:01, Mike Champion wrote:
>> 4/24/2002 12:33:29 PM, Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net> wrote:
>> >Given these facts, I have recently tended to give the SemWeb the benefit
>> >of the doubt. It is probably in the same state SGML was before XML. It
>> >needs a simplification and some killer apps.
>>
>> Perhaps, but it has generated an awful lot of ill feeling for
>the W3C leadership, in my
>> humble and personal opinion garnered from many private
>conversations. Whatever the
>> justification for that ill feeling, it is critical for SemWeb
>advocates to understand and
>> come to grips with it.
>>
>> I see three general threads in the critique of the semantic web
>initiative:
>
>While I think your critique of the Semantic Web is quite reasonable, and
>I consider myself generally hostile to both Web Services (WS) and the
>Semantic Web, I think you've missed something important as you picked up
>Dare's red herring.
>
>In the past, I'd hoped that the SW and WS would just plain counteract
>each and keep each other at bay. I don't see that happening now that
>each has its own activity. That said, it's worth contrasting the two
>activities in terms of their relevance to and impact on the Web.
>
>The Semantic Web, for all its folly, isn't really a threat to Web
>architecture per se. While I think TimBL's insistence that we let him
>return RDF in dereferencing namespace URIs is hideous and ugly, it's
>hideous and ugly for reasons that have more to do with XML than anything
>Web-like that came before. The Semantic Web is basically about creating
>frameworks that rest on top of the Web-as-we-know-it and reusing them.
>
>Whether those frameworks make sense or not is a different matter.
>
>Web Services is a very different matter architecturally. It makes an
>even greater mess of our limited understandings of URIs by putting
>multiple potentially unknown possibilities behind a single URI,
>conflates headers and messages constantly, and its creators appear to
>have zero patience for any notion of the Web that might in fact
>constrain whatever they feel like doing.
>
>While the Semantic Web may be a waste of time, it's no threat to the
>Web, and may in fact end up enhancing the more conventional Web. While
>Web Services may feel like today's hot and exciting thing, it feels to
>me like pollution of the Web at a very fundamental level.
>
>Agent Orange did a very nice job defoliating trees - hey, it worked! It
>also had some nasty side effects.
>
>--
>Simon St.Laurent
>Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
>Errors, errors, all fall down!
>http://simonstl.com
>
>
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