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Kendall,
We discussed it before because I had said (a bit facetiously) that the
current Semantic Web is mostly FOAF files, tools, and talk. I certainly
wouldn't deny that FOAF files are part of the Semantic Web; without them,
there'd be little left!
As I've mentioned on the rdf-interest list, I still haven't heard a use case
that demonstrates what value RSS 1.0 files of transient data can play in a
semantic web. If it was current practice to archive them (like monkeyfist
does) and I was reading an article by someone and wanted to see more by that
person, semantic web technology crawling RSS 1.0 archives would make it easy
to turn up more articles by that person. Maybe not everything he ever wrote,
because in some bylines he may use his middle initial or called himself
"James" instead of "Jim", but I would have found something.
It's not that I'm against transient data having any role period. Movie
timetables are transient data, so if someone made those available as RDF
files (haven't found anyone who does yet), I could obviously see why those
would be useful. I'm just wondering how people can apply semantic web
technology to take advantage of transient RSS 1.0 files to do things that
they can't do with RSS .9, 2.0, etc. files. In other words, what makes them
part of the semantic web? The mere fact that they're in RDF?
The SemWeb life sciences conference is a great example of how a specific
domain, especially one currently suffering from data overload, is fertile
ground for proving the value of semantic web technology, and publicly
available data is appearing (http://www.rdfdata.org/data.html#bio). I was
just telling a biomedical research professor about it over the weekend, and
he was anxious to hear more.
Bob
-----Original Message-----
From: Kendall Clark [mailto:kendall@monkeyfist.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 09, 2004 12:34 PM
To: DuCharme, Bob (LNG-CHO)
Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Issues with XML and Semantic Web ?
On Tue, Nov 09, 2004 at 12:18:23PM -0500, DuCharme, Bob (LNG-CHO) wrote:
> more ideas, but the amount of practical, usable RDF data still seems
> remarkably small. I've been compiling a list at rdfdata.org, and it's
> getting harder and harder to find new entries.
Bob,
We've talked about this before, but every FOAF and RSS 1.0 resource is an
RDF file. I don't know why you discount that data as non-transient. That
people don't archive all of their RSS 1.0 events seems a matter of a best
practice. It doesn't change the fact that there are *lots* of RSS 1.0 (which
are RDF) resources on the Web. (And there are good social reasons for why
people might not want to maintain all their FOAF versions.)
It seems to me that we're maybe in the "intranet" phase of the Semantic Web,
that is, lots of non-public RDF inside enterprise and institutional walls,
while the amount of RDF on the public Web continues to grow (even if not
exponentially).
Lots of folks using RDF and OWL in the life sciences world, or so I learned
at the W3C's workshop about SemWeb in LifeSci in Boston a few weeks ago, and
the great majority of that isn't on the public Web.
My two cents, anyway. :>
Kendall Clark
Managing Editor, XML.com
--
Sometimes it's appropriate, even patriotic, to be ashamed of your country.
-- James Howard Kunstler
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