Slashdot Mirror
RDF and OWL Are W3C Recommendations
J1 writes "The World Wide Web Consortium today released the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL) as W3C Recommendations. RDF is used to represent information and to exchange knowledge in the Web. OWL is used to publish and share sets of terms called ontologies, supporting advanced Web search, software agents and knowledge management. Read the press release for the full list of twelve documents, read the testimonials, and visit the Semantic Web home page."
You mean the people who force us to put one ALT attribute for each IMG tag, but have 8 ALT="" on their own web page?
Who really cares about their recommendations?
While I'm all for better markup, there's quite a jump from proper use of "semantic markup" in HTML to RDF. RDF is quite another language.
Political agendas aside, a standards body has to recognize what technologies and extensions are actually being used "in the wild" and incorporate them into the standard. Whether you like M$ or not, you have to recognize that MSIE is the de-facto standard browser today. A W3C standard means jack shit if MS doesn't implement it, and a W3C standard that doesn't address commonly-used MSIE extensions devalues WC3's credibility and usefulness as a standards body. All de-facto "standard" web languages need to be standardized, just as the competing implementations of JavaScript were standardized into ECMAscript.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
It's poorly researched and poorly considered. (Speaking as someone misquoted in the article...)
Perhaps you could clarify then - I'd be interested in your feedback (specifically where you were misquoted), so I can go and re-read the article with your quotes in context.
For good responses see Peter Van Dijck or Paul Ford.
I consider neither of these to be "good" responses.
I was unable to get through the first, as it was incredibly difficult to read with all those pictures and quotes interrupting the text flow.
I stopped reading the second when I saw the following:
'Shirky defines the Semantic Web as "a machine for creating syllogisms." This is an over-simplification. The Semantic Web cannot "create", any more than the current Web can create.'
This obvious straw-man setup comes immediately after the author decries Shirkey's article as being full of them. (Note that Shirkey doesn't say "the semantic web will create syllogisms", he says that it's a machine for doing so.)
It's been reported in other /. articles that on one hand, M$ will use an XML schema for all Word documents. However, the next licensing agreement for Office will stipulate that no one is permitted to reverse-engineer the schema for use in an open source project.
This makes me think that "security through legally -enforced obscurity" will be the order of the day in Redmond. Imagine if, say, all element names were encrypted, or were even just bloody confusing, e.g. <ioueWOIUKJRE87yjhi> arial </ioueWOIUKJRE87yjhi>.
This will make M$ appear open, but only appear so. C'est plus ca change...
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
> A lot of W3C standards seem overlooked by some pretty big sites.
/. partially depends on donations/subscriptions they owe it to their paying readers not to waste pennies on that) and deliver content in a standards compatible way.
That is because there are a lot of very complex standards with little or no toolsupport. Most of the implementations of the major w3c standards are incomplete and/or inconsistent with the specification.
As a content provider (i.e. a website maintainer) there is no point in producing stuff that the majority of the visitors cannot display. Basically anything beyond xhtml1.0 and a subset of CSS1 & 2 w3c standards compliant documents are totally pointless if the intention is that anyone can access them.
BTW. I agree that slashdot is long overdue in supporting standards. Sites like wired.com and espn.com show that it is possible to save bandwidth (considering that
Jilles
I totally agree. It wasn't too long ago that an article on A List Apart that described what Slashdot could to redesign it with web standards Not only would it make Slashdot comply with web standards, it would save them 3-14gb of bandwidth a day!
Every Super Villan uses Linux.
Yes, they're available via http and include many web technologies but really these are about metadata and relationship information, not presentation. There's more to "The Web" then endless HTML pages, and that other space is where these are aimed at. Material using these newly set standards can be linked and searched and eventually massaged for presentation but the raw stuff isn't intended for your traditional web browser to use itself.
Y'know, thats a really interesting opinion, but it would be more so if you were to tie it to the topic at hand. Yes these are quickly evolving technologies and yes, what's out in the field doesn't always match what's in the standards process. However when you talk to the folks doing this stuff IRL most will tell you they're trailblazing out of need and are quite enthusiastic about a standard eventually happening they can use. Indeed many of them are actively involved in the standard-setting process and applying the lessons they've learned.Sometimes the W3C does seem out in left field: It's got any number of way-far-ahead things cooking, as well as any number of other passed-by ones still stumbling along. It's hard to predict when starting up a committee what will be needed when they're done, nor always how it will end up being used, or if it will all be quickly irrelevant. On the other hand they're right on target much of the time, and if occasionally laggard they're as often prescient.
But back to the immediate topic both these specs being set will be welcomed in many circles. Neither appears perfect but both seem quite good, immediately usable, and without great conflict to past practice.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
eventSherpa is cool. I happened upon this one day while searching for calendar applications.
We need more user-facing semWeb apps like this. The data is now getting out there in a machine-readable format. This opens up lots of cool possibilities for "personal agents" and other things which thrive in a structured environment.
All Shirkey has accomplished on that page is to prove that a semantic web that contains incorrect information will produce incorrect results.
I disagree. While his examples do show that (my initial assessment was on par with yours) he does address this issue.
In each case he uses a flawed set of axioms to produce a flawed result and decides that the TECHNIQUE is at fault.
Not quite - in each case he uses a flawed set of axioms, then expands on them to show that the world is not a black-and-white place, which then shows that the technique is invalid when applied to most real-world data.
It's a subtle point which is easily missed, especially considering the way it's presented - but it is there.
If you make accurate claims, then you can reach accurate conclusions.
Not true. You example ("Some people who live in Brooklyn speak with a Brooklyn accent") is an accurate claim, but you admit that no conclusion (accurate or otherwise) can be drawn from it. That is the danger of exclusively using this type of deductive logic.
Granted, but the web's 'unFUBARness' and forgiving/liberal parsing of HTML, is a large part of its success.
In contrast, Mark Pilgrim, has been documenting the evolution of XML's error handling (which is pretty much "fail on first error"). Something I personally think is good (in the projects where we use XML), but general adoption is far slower. The threshold - while pretty low - is too high.
668.5
Not true. You example ("Some people who live in Brooklyn speak with a Brooklyn accent") is an accurate claim, but you admit that no conclusion (accurate or otherwise) can be drawn from it. That is the danger of exclusively using this type of deductive logic.
Wow, you're missing the obvious. How about this:
"Clay Sharkey might speak with a Brooklyn accent."
Not quite - in each case he uses a flawed set of axioms, then expands on them to show that the world is not a black-and-white place, which then shows that the technique is invalid when applied to most real-world data.
This then shows nothing of the sort.
Speaking of syllogisms, both you and Shirkey appear to be making the following logical argument:
1. A technique that is not universally applicable is not useful.
2. Deductive logic is not universally applicable.
3. Therefore deductive logic is not useful.
4. The Semantic Web relies on deductive logic.
5. Any technology that relies on a not-useful technique is not useful.
6. Thefore the Semantic Web is not useful.
And of course, premise is absurd, and therefore the final conclusion is equally absurd. You simply cannot draw the conclusion that this technology is useless.
This connects with his mistaken point that the Semantic Web is based on some single universal ontology. This is of course the opposite of what RDF is about -- it's about allowing lots of ontologies to be used side by side.
So we don't model the real world perfectly, we model it well enough for some set of applications in some ontology. Every database designer, nearly every programmer does this all the time. We model it well enough and then the computers... do what computers do.
RDF is nothing new here. What's new is establishing a fairly wide and precise consensus around a language for communicating data about arbitrary things.