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RDF and OWL Are W3C Recommendations

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the standardization-baby dept.

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."

15 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. This is good news by byolinux · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Semantic Web is a interesting progression. Maybe hopefully more sites will start to use better markup on their websites now. A lot of W3C standards seem overlooked by some pretty big sites.

    Surely it's about time for Slashdot to go XHTML+CSS?

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    1. Re:This is good news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Surely it's about time for Slashdot to go XHTML+CSS?

      I'd be thrilled if they even just went to valid HTML. Then we could move to a nice HTML 4.01 transitional with CSS. Heck, they still haven't replaced their .gifs with 8-bit .pngs which would save them a chunk bandwidth (it all adds up!).

    2. Re:This is good news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
      For a long time, slashdot did not allow the w3c validator to check the HTML that slashcode generates to be validated. For more information, read here. These days, it does allow the validator's use, but it is kind of a mess.

      Slashdot is unlikely to follow w3c standards as it does not believe in them.

  2. The semantic web... by schon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When I first read about "the semantic web", my first thoughts were "how the hell is this useful?"

    About a year later, I noticed that Clay Shirkey had written an interesting article on the Semantic Web...

    It's a bit of a long read, but it does sum up the issues with it quite handily.

    1. Re:The semantic web... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      All Shirkey has accomplished on that page is to prove that a semantic web that contains incorrect information will produce incorrect results.

      The examples Shirkey uses are fundamentally flawed. In each case he uses a flawed set of axioms to produce a flawed result and decides that the TECHNIQUE is at fault. That's utterly rediculous. Using his example of himself and Boston:

      - The creator of shirky.com lives in Brooklyn
      - People who live in Brooklyn speak with a Brooklyn accent

      He comes up with the logical conclusion that he speaks with a Brooklyn accent. This conclusion is wrong, but only because the second assertion is wrong. In order to accurately represent the world you must say "Some people who live in Brooklyn speak with a Brooklyn accent," in which case you can make no logical conclusion about whether or not Shirkey has an accent.

      If you make absurd claims then of course you will come to absurd conclussions. If you make accurate claims, then you can reach accurate conclusions. Either way, logical deduction has no role in the fault or success of your conclusions. It all depends on the axioms you start with, not the technique.

    2. Re:The semantic web... by schon · · Score: 3, Interesting

      My actual response at the time is brief and chatty. The response from Dan Brickley is also short and sweet.

      Thanks, I find both of these much better than the two you gave - you're both pretty succinct.

      One issue I have with Brickley's response is his criticism of Shirkey's alternative that we 'do nothing'.. he seems to have fallen inot the trap of 'we should to do something, this is something, therefore we should do this' (if you'll pardon the syllogism. :o)

      Sometimes it is better to do nothing than to do the wrong thing; even if you don't see anything better, once that something better does come along, it is often difficult to undo that something once it's become entrenched. (Note, I'm not saying that's what's happening here, this is just a general response to someone who implies that doing nothing is always worse than doing something.)

      The "misquoting" is to suggest that my "how you buy a book on the Semantic Web" sketch should possibly cause Jeff Bezos to lose sleep. I was trying to explain an experimental protocol in a way I hoped my grandmother could understand

      Ahh, I see.. I remember that passage pretty well.. I didn't put too much stock into the 'Jeff Bezos' comment - to me, it sounded like a joke, I don't think he was seriously suggesting that anyone involved in the SW project had any such plans for Amazon (or anyone else.)

      All in all, thanks for your responses, they've been quite informative.

  3. Re:And with Microsoft's market control by I+confirm+I'm+not+a · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Most blogs have RDF/RSS feeds right now. And just a few days ago there was an article right here on /. about embedding licensing information in web sites - more semantic webbery ;)

    Microsoft? Didn't they use to make a browser or something?

    --
    This is where the serious fun begins.
  4. Microsoft Reporting Services by airrage · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Microsoft has already decided to use the RDF standard in it's XML based reporting solution. The interesting thing with this product is it's being touted as a open-source like product: reports are XML based, no binary required to view them, rdf would be a standard, reports are HTML-viewed, no required viewer. Which is funny that Microsoft is trying to break into the reporting market by being generic to break the hold of the current slew of companies that hold the monopoly there with more proprietary solutions.

    Interesting don't ya think?

    Peace Out.

    --
    "This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
  5. Review vocabulary by Deraj+DeZine · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've been looking for some sort of RDF review vocabulary so that I can incorporate product reviews into RSS feeds (but also store them seperately in a complete archive or something). With some sort of review aggregator/grabber, it seems like this would be simple to find out if your friends (as opposed to zealots) liked/disliked a product. The best-looking review vocabulary I've found is the Ideagraph one. Any tools that support reviews with such a format? Or any repositories for RDF reviews? Other formats?

    --
    True story.
  6. Re:W3C? by seriv · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Some standards are a good thing, plus you don't have to follow them. I am one of those people who validate all my web pages, and I would rather have people be able to read my webpages universally rather then not at all. I read some of the html standards before, and they really care about making the web usable for all.

  7. Re:About RDF by SandHawk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    RDF/XML uses XML namespaces as a somewhat convenient way to write URIs (which are normally quite long).

    RDF (in the abstract) doesn't use namespaces, it just uses URIs (aka URLs). (The concept of namespaces is still there in effect, as a collection of related names, in an ontology -- but that's quite different from the formalism of XML Namespaces.)

  8. Lost and without a clue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting
    The current RDF spec sucks and OWL is barely acceptable. the worse part about RDF is it has conflicting protocols for existing ones that people already support. Take RDF schema for example. Very few people outside of academia support it. RDF schema blows and isn't as flexible as Schema. Schema isn't perfect either, but it is atleast better than RDF Schema. RDF-rules blow chunks and doesn't even support horn logic. If you read the RDF-rules mailing list, you'll see most of the people are demanding horn logic like rule grammar and not their stupid query based tuple grammar.

    Then there's RDF-query, which is suppose to be used with RDF-rules and RDF schema. There's already a better protocol in xquery. W3C is rapidly becoming useless and isn't willing to find a compromise between solid theory and practical application.

  9. Markup by ka9dgx · · Score: 2, Interesting
    When are we going to get real markup? A lot of this stuff just falls out of an effort to get a real, working markup language, instead of this HTML related crap we've been shoveling around for years.

    If the markup is part of the content, it's not really pure content, or good markup. Markup tags should reference the content, not be embedded in it.

    The separate Structure, Content and Markup layers should all be parsable without knowledge of the others.

    --Mike--

  10. Re:OWL Web Ontology Language by tcopeland · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's because the the Web Ontology Language Working Group disliked the acronym "WOL" and decided to call it OWL.

    Also, consider the A. A. Milne character Owl, who "could spell his own name WOL, and he could spell Tuesday so that you knew it wasn't Wednesday, and he could read quite comfortably when you weren't looking over his shoulder saying "Well?" all the time...".

    --
    The Army reading list
  11. Semantic web social networking by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    http://www.zopto.com/