RE: [xml-dev] What are Web Services for? (Was RE: [xml-dev] lots of WS reading material)

Joshua Allen wrote:
> But content-providers providing metadata about their own content is not
> what the semantic web is about.  That would be like a WWW where you
> could only hyperlink to your own pages.  The idea of the semantic web is
> that anybody can provide metadata about anyone else's stuff without
> getting permission, or needing the other resource to be on-line.

Fair point, but I still feel that my basic premise is valid. There certainly
value in the ability to annotate web resources (although the technical
challenges are daunting, as your -- I think -- article seemed to indicate),
just as there is value in RPC or in the XML infoset. But if you want to talk
about the kind of change-the-world effect that the web has had, I'm far more
excited about approaches that leverage existing infrastructure but move it
into the XML world so that more synergies can be exploited. There is implict
metadata in markup, provided that the same schemas are used for the same
purposes, and there is significant momentum in any number of fields to
settle on common vocabularies for exactly this reason.

Matt