Is The Semantic Web A Pipe Dream?

wdebruij asks: "I'm currently writing a small program for sharing information over the internet. For categorizing and indexing this information I want to use RDF and the semantic web as described by the WWW consortium, but since the documentation says nothing about a standard dictionary I seriously doubt we will ever have such a general information index. The Open Directory Project has written it's directory in RDF, but does anyone know of another 'standard' dictionary?" The whole point behind the "semantic web" concept is that data is organized online in such a manner, that a variety of different, independently designed machines can use it without compatibility issues.

Comments

RDF vocabulary

[BobGregg]

If you're looking for a standard "vocabulary" to use in the context of RDF, W3's RDF FAQ has a link to suggestions about how to implement the Dublin Core tags via RDF. For a more specific and extensive vocabulary, you're probably right - there's very little agreement about what sort of standard to use. It's kind of ironic actually; libraries have been using one of two different organizational systems (Dewey or LOC) for roughly a century, either of which seems like it would lend itself handily to indexing the web topically. Yet in the quickest-growing body of knowledge on the planet, nobody wants either of those, and nobody seems to be able to agree on anything new either.

This is where SWAG comes in

[aswartz]

I feel sort of bad plugging my own group, but this is exactly the problem that SWAG is meant to solve. SWAG is the Semantic Web Agreement Group, and we bring different users of the SWeb together to try and build sets of common terms. Our current project is to build a dictionary of common terms, which you can find at: WebNS.net.

Obviously, the Semantic Web won't work if we only have one dictionary, but it will work much better if agree on the terms we use when possible. So SWAG isn't trying to enforce terms, but merely recommend them.

We work on a process of consensus so that we can move quite quickly and new terms don't get bogged down in endless talking.

So I hope you'll visit us, once again the address is: http://purl.org/swag/.

Semantic Web is a layered framework

[Edd_Dumbill]

As the Semantic Web is a layered framework, the actual vocabularies you use to describe things are applications of the framework rather than the framework itself.

One such application that might prove useful in what you're tackling is RSS. What you seem to be looking for is a taxonomy against which you can classify things. These are expensive to develop and hence rare, the ODP being one of the few that are public. My advice is, if the ODP doesn't fit, classify by topic yourself (but avoid the mistake of struggling to produce a hierarchical system, this is rarely appropriate). At a later stage you can express equivalences to other folks' categories. Folks on the RSS-DEV mailing list would be happy to share experience of categorization.

Anyone seeking more information as to what the Semantic Web actually is and how it fits together might be interested in some of the articles I've written on the topic, which give an overview both of the vision and of ways you can get started with tools:

• Building the Semantic Web
• Berners-Lee and the Semantic Web Vision
• The Semantic Web: A Primer

-- Edd Dumbill, Editor, XML.com.