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Web Redesigned With Hindsight
Randy Sparks writes "Tim Berners-Lee has been speaking about his vision for the Web. He proposed the Semantic Web six years ago and it's taken that long for the W3C to ratify his plans for Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL). Effective the Semantic Web is the Web as we know it put into database form and with added metadata. You can read more about it over on MacWorld and see a Semantic Web proof-of-concept at the Web Archive."
Shouldn't that be WOL, and not OWL?
I thought OWL (Ordinary Wizarding Levels) belonged in Hogwart's.
Solomon
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
"The aim of the Semantic Web is to add metadata to information placed online, to allow it to be readable by machines. That context would enable automation of a variety of interactions. An online catalog could, for instance, connect to a user's order history and preferences to a calendar, to automatically pick out available delivery times.".
Wow... just simply amazing.. *sigh*
Anyone care to shed some light (or links) onto what RDF and OWL actually do?
Hmmm.
Tim Berners-Lee had been saying right from the beginning that viewing a web page should be integrated with creating it. In the early 90s, of course, the infrastructure was just not there, but when the technology did catch up, look how wikis have succeeded! Of course, it is the social aspect as much as the technical that makes wikis like the good old 'pedia what they are, and I doubt if Berners-Lee anticipated that, but nevertheless I'd say that the success of wikis proves him to be a true visionary.
Hi there,
Kind of a late reply here, but i had to take care of some emails.
Anyways, I used RDF in a proprietary OWL-like software company for the purpose of organizing content repositories in a formal language that would span the domain of the company i was working for.
14erCleaner noted that the web is popular b/c it is so easy to create web pages. I would have to agree with this, and also add that the reason why the RDF and OWL spec are important is along the lines of what nizo posted about the web being all about porn! There is SO much content, and yet to derive any kind of automated meaning from all of it, would be a task that is almost out of the scope of realisticly ever completing. There is no standard to the structure of documents, nor how one document may relate to another.
The RDF and OWL specs provide a framework that do exactly that. Berniers-Lee and the RDF working group essentially lay down what is infact (sorry 14erCleaner, but a 20 yr old intern got it pretty easily) a simple (yet ambiguous) way of describing something. It is like this. Something-RelatesTo-Something. Read the spec and keep that in mind, and that is the basis of what they have described. The OWL i am not as familiar with (too busy building a proprietary one!!)
anyways, enuf rant, i would encourage everyone to read what he has to say, and most of all, if you are a web author, use the RDF spec! imagine if instead of using google to do a text search for whatever was on your mind, you could write a sql statement that actually represented the structure of resource web pages on the internet and brought you to a list of documents relating EXACTLY to the Something-RelatesTo-Something sentence you had entered as your query! That is the true possibility of this "redesign"!
~not there any longer, but a good plug for this technology - they are making ontologies for health care purposes, basically all the info surrounding the care of a premature baby! Can't get a more noble cause than that!
http://www.cstlink.com/
Nice attempt at FUD, but once all of the Semantic Web technologies are in place, applications (analogous to an HTML editor) will be made that hide nearly all of the complexities of serializations and ontologies. Most of the Semantic Web's benefits will be realized under the hood for desktop users.
So the interface will be simple; the foundation is more sophisticated because it attempts solves a complex problem.
Besides, if you like Googling around to find reviews of products and then determining the credibility of the author based on the appearance of their name on other web sites, you can just keep doing that and ignore trust networks entirely. I mean, if you've got a lot of time to waste.
True story.
The semantic web is the return of the snake oil salesman of the 70s and early 80s who highjacked AI research with undeliverable promises of intelligent machines "just around the corner".
s ho ld=-1&commentsort=1&tid=95&mode=nested&cid=9207128
To this date, serious AI researchers are still paying the price of this scientific fraud, which makes cold fussion look like a prank.
Tim Berners-Lee is a good person and not a computer scientist so he has neither the knowledge nor enough malice to understand the pack of thieves he has surrounded himself with.
I'm not the only one saying this:
Semantic web is doomed to failure precisely because it is being pushed by a group with a reputation for talking rather than doing.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=108295&thre
given the nature of what they are trying to do with the sematic web stuff, and how using some sort of tagging/xml schema to define relationships, does this set the stage for a rule base like set of interactions to autmatically execute when the proper relationships are created that meet pre-defined rules? this would allow interactions between servers to happen naturally and allow for self-organizational-like qualities to 'emerge' from the web.
or i'm just a dreamer.
just a thought though...
It's not IE that holds back W3C standards. It's that the standards are positively byzantine, and so complicated to implement that it's simply not worth the effort.
So why is it that these standards are too complicated for the richest software company in the world to cope with, but a small company like Opera can handle it, and so can a bunch of amateur hippies coding engines like Gecko and KHTML in their spare time?
You must have seen the famous 'fake transparency with fixed-position images' trick by now. The one that doesn't work in IE because it inexplicably only permits fixed-position images on the body element.
Or the CSS-only menus trick, which don't work in IE because it doesn't permit hover events on arbitrary elements.
Little CSS1 things that would take maybe a week to fix and test thoroughly, yet the world's richest software company apparently can't manage them. Poor little Microsoft, stuck with people criticising them for refusing to implement these terribly arcane and hideously complicated standards. Diddums.
This sounds a lot like this an earlier Tim Berners-Lee effort. It was an awesome language that really did a nice job at combining rich OO programming with a markup-language; but too bad the company that took it over made the licensing of the language so painful it never caught on. Anyway, that project did make some really cool demos of what the technology is capable of.
Also you don't seem to understand what a NAT does at all.
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