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Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>jonathan@openhealth.org (Jonathan Borden) writes:
>
>
>>The point is that RDF/OWL is *a way* to specify shared semantics, not
>>the only way. It is as useful as is the subset of all software that is
>>written to process it. The more software that is written to conform to
>>RDF/OWL, the more useful it gets, just like the browser itself, or PDF
>>Word, etc.
>>
>>
>
>Call me when it gets there. Browsers, PDF, and Word all have much more
>modest and perhaps even achievable ambitions.
>
>
Note to self ... schedule call to Simon circa 2100...
Admittedly RDF/OWL have nowhere near the 'market share' of HTML and XML.
There is also no question in my mind that the principle benefit of XML
is syntactic... I'd go as far as to say the *sole* benefit of XML. Yet
if all we were concerned about was *syntax* then this mailgroup should
have shut itself down perhaps sometime in 2000 ... aside from our
discussions of character mappings, unicode esoterica, NEL etc... which
have zero effect on me *personally* (I don't mean to denigrate the
importance of cleaning all this up, it's just that I *personally* don't
give this issues a moments notice when sitting down to write an XML
application)
So, we have XML, we have SAX which transmits XML to applications ...
*and that's about it.* It all really works quite well, and has received
great adoption. Let's declare success! (seriously)
Of course we still have issues when transmitting information, and
writing programs that process messages/information, which is why this
group remains active. Lot's of these issues relate to
semantics/schemata/"PSVI" etc. There seems to me, from what I read here,
a *huge* need to better understand application level *semantics* and how
to properly understand semantics in a rational, useful and specific
fashion, rather than as a catch-all phrase for everything beyond byte
encodings.
BTW: RDF is catching on in a pernocious fashion e.g.
http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/main.html see:
http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/related.html but clearly it remains to
be seen. On the other hand much of the fun (for me) is in *getting
there* rather than in where we end up.
Jonathan
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