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Welkin: A General-Purpose RDF Browser

Posted by timothy on from the what-am-I-thinking-about dept.

Stefano Mazzocchi writes "Many consider the Semantic Web to be vaporware and others believe it's the next big thing. No matter where you stand, a question always pops up: Where is the RDF browser? The SIMILE Project, a joint project between W3C, MIT and HP to implement semantic interoperability of metadata in digital libraries, released today the first beta release of a general purpose graphic and interactive RDF browser named Welkin (see a screenshot), targetted to those who need to get a mental model of any RDF dataset, from a single RSS 1.0 news feed to a collection of digital data."

2 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. There goes those AI-types. by Jagasian · · Score: 1, Troll

    I am sure I will be modded as a troll, but somebody needs to say it, somebody needs to stop these guys.

    The "Semantic web" is the latest snake oil being pawned by the AI community.

    Nothing is worse than an AI-type. They make big claims and never deliver. They overly anthropomorphize all aspects of computation, fooling themselves into a false understanding of all that is related to computer science. For example, Emacs is "intelligent" because it includes a broken implementation of the lambda-calculus, an implementation that doesn't even properly implement beta-reduction? Since when has breadth-first search, depth-first search, and other search algorithms had anything to do with intelligence? They are just procedures for solving problems. The list goes on and on...

    These people regularly try to disprove things such as the undecidability of various problems, the incompleteness of various logics, etc... as these undeniable mathematical proofs point to the fact that computers cannot be intelligent. Sure it is fun for sci-fi movies, but it surely isn't real science.

    The semantic web is nothing more than AI-types recycling their same old crap. RDF and OWL, the two most popular scripting languages for the semantic web, are just "semantic nets", an AI concept from the 1970s, rehashed. Yup, when you can't sell any snake oil, just rename it to something else and profit... and profit they do, but does society ever see the AI-types' promises come to fruition?

    Give me a break! Give the world a break. Computer science is just that: a science, and so the pseudoscience that is AI must be addressed by more people in the field of computer science.

  2. Re:This business isn't vaporware.. by Jagasian · · Score: 0, Troll

    Each new wave of bullshit from the AI community lives for about 5-8 years before it completely dies on its lies and crap.