RE: [xml-dev] The perils of P18S (was Re: [xml-dev] Why RDF is ha rd )

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

And that makes perfect sense.    Where one can get vetted reliable

metadata in machine processable form, barring consistent superstion,

one indeed can speed up the process of knowledge acquisition.   No one 

has to wait for that to begin solving problems with the technologies 

as Uche correctly states, but the big picture SemWeb itself, will still 

take years to come about. 

 

One problem, of course, is the dilemma that spawned expert

systems work.    Level of detail makes knowing everything about

everything impossible (even putting aside from quantum effects); but then I don't

expect anyone in the SemWeb work claims that to be realistic.   What I expect

is what happens in expert systems.   A particular domain with recognized

and experienced subject matter experts works on the metadata for

that domain.   As more of these domains prove reliable, relationships

among them can then be developed.  

 

These relationships can help out superstitions because assertions

that are consistent in one domain can create inconsistencies in

a related domain.    That the machine can find this and present

it (it never sleeps) to the researcher as a possible problem is

very useful.

 

Tools make this easier to build.    The basic Semweb languages

should not make this harder.   For the Semweb to payoff, a lot

of grunt assertion acquisition work has to be done and tested in

each domain, then tested by creating relationships among domains.

This takes a lot of time and effort.    I would expect that once the

foundation work on the languages and technologies is complete,

it will take another ten years of hard use to get the kinds of

benefits envisioned.   That's ok.  It would be worth it.

 

I realize that some money can be made up front

in dedicated applications, but anyone looking for a fast buck

in this field should take up another. 

 

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Danny Ayers [mailto:danny666@virgilio.it]
 
T here's no disputing that if there is no information available that falls outside of the superstitious class, then we'll continue with the spontaneous maggot assumption. But there is potential for reasoning that can take us outside - assert the maggotty meat fact, negate the spontaneous generation fact and see what falls through the net. I do suspect it will be a good while before we see anything useful outside of academia, but the potential's there.  I've lost the ref again, but there's also the work that discovered some medical link using data mining techniques. Semweb technologies should make this kind of thing a whole lot easier.

 

In the nearer term, having tools that can enable more structured discussion (such as the ClaiMaker app) may make it possible for current, largely human processes to be accelerated, so things like scientific advances can happen more rapidly. The web has enabled an awful lot more people to have an extremely broad range of material that was previously hard to come by, the semweb should make it easier to find and work with. It's rather prosaic, but my inability to quote the medical link piece of work is a perfect example of a problem that decent RDF-based indexing could solve.

 

One other bit of bluish sky follows from noting that information from sensors in the real world can be fed directly in to the web - nothing remarkable about that. But the data can be immediately available for analysis alongside the huge corpus that is the web - hypotheses can be checked in real time, as long as the data and those hypotheses are expressed in a machine-understandable fashion. Let's get the machines doing the work for a change.