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Welkin: A General-Purpose RDF Browser
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."
Considering the big 1.0 for Firefox is out, I would think people who wanted their Semantic Web browsing software to be wide-spread would implement it as a Firefox plugin, no?
Simpy
The question is about whether we really need a World Wide Web that looks like Wikipedia with links to every word and generally just a jumbled mess of blue and purple text. No matter how you cut it, the problem lies in having too much information immediately available.
Imagine you are a reading a book, but each word is connected by string to a dictionary reference, and each dictionary reference definition is tied to the definitions of the words in the definition. You'd end up with a huge, eventually circular mess of string and you couldn't realistically get any enjoyment out of the book. The fact of the matter is that if you want to get more information about something, it is easy to go to an outside source to look it up. It does not need to be easier, because by making it easier than it must be you necessarily end up cluttering the thing you want to illuminate.
There is an old saw, "Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler." The Semantic Web, while an interesting idea, tries to make things too easy, beyond the point of usefulness. The lack of content on the Semantic Web is a testament to the uselessness of such an over-engineered web space.
enough people have said it, but it's worth while saying again. RDF is totally flawed and will never meet the vision of W3C. The whole idea that an RDF resource is true and authorative is just silly. Look at what happened to HTML metadata tag. I got abused instantly and search engines stopped using them. RDF rules is monotonic, which is just totally silly. that basically means any rules written in RDF will timeout if the data isn't already on that particular server. W3C should just give up already on RDF and move on.
Or a testament to people's inability to understand new paradigms.
Or a testament of the inability of the paradigm's creator to get people to understand it's necessity.
After looking at that screenshot, it's sooo clear to me the value that the semantic web brings to us (mirrored here as their server appears to be flaking out a bit). If anything, this makes it crystal clear why the semantic web hasn't really taken off, other than in the much more limited form of RSS feeds.
A network of random connections of semantic concepts embodied as URIs is just not a friendly form of data for humans to manipulate directly, and I don't think it every will be. That's right, I don't believe this is really an issue that's solvable with slightly better tools. I think ultimately the management of and connection of ontologies is something that computers will have to learn to do themselves.
It's just too hard to expect normal human beings to describe knowledge in any way other than the way we are used to. The web is only as popular as it is because HTML is a simple, appearance-based way to markup documents (yes, I realize strictly speaking HTML isn't supposed to describe many aspects of appearance per se, but there's no denying that it comes from that root). We understand bold and italics (and even strong and em), but ask somebody to generate two concepts by constructing URIs for them and relating them in subject-predicate form and they are going to look at you and drool.
Even programmers aren't used to the idea of describing knowledge - it's one thing to tell a computer what to do, it's another thing to tell a computer how to know about something that you know.
Alright, I know I'm opening myself up to the flames here, so flame away. Anyway, I think the "semantic web" will need to wait for tools like Cyc et. al. to come along far enough to construct and relate their own ontologies out of English text, and until then all we will see is stuff like RSS or RDF files in Firefox extensions to describe deployment conditions (i.e. stuff that can be done with any arbitrary XML dialect that doesn't really qualify as the "semantic web" to me).
Are people marking this Funny just to be cruel? I find this rather interesting. XUL's data model is RDF already, so it's not like Firefox doesn't already have the foundation to do this.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Browsing metadata is the next frontier in the evolution of the web. Some of the other RDF browsers popping up include Gnowsis, MIT Haystack, and Fenfire.
With the growth of the Internet, the value of data itself is dropping, while the value of metadata (i.e. "data about data") increases, introducing a need for tools that can manipulate metadata. That is what RDF is all about - standardizing a way to represent metadata. It is not a standard for the metadata itself...those standards will be determined the same way everything else is on the Internet: with the best solutions rising to the top.
The most common objections to this scenario?
a) "Nobody will bother entering metadata". Wrong...it's already happening. Users are voluntarily generating metadata all the time. Just check out sites like flickr (photo blogging) and del.icio.us (collaborative bookmarks), not to mention Amazon reviews and Ebay ratings.
b) "RDF tags will just be abused with spam, trolls, and other useless info". A variety of techniques are emerging that are designed to protect the integrity of user-contributed data, including trust metrics like Slashdot's own distributed moderation (PDF) or Advogato.
Nooface
In Search of the Post-PC Interface
I promoted RDF a fair bit back in the late 1990s and even wrote one of the first libraries for it. I think that the idea of machine-readable data on the web is a very good one (and probably more scalable than the whole Web Services thing), but six or so years later, I don't think that RDF is it.
The trouble is that RDF (and OWL) try to do too much, getting all tangled up in the arcana of knowledge representation, and the Semantic Web thing has only muddied the waters further -- the screenshot is a stunning graphic representation of the mess that RDF has gotten itself into (I'll assume that it's serious, since it's a long time until 1 April).
All we really need for a data web is a bunch of XML files online that make references to each other for machines to follow, the same way that web pages make links -- in other words, a data web would be a distributed database, the same way that the document web is a distributed hypertext system. RDF reminds me more of the complex pre-HTML hypertext systems of the late 1980s than of the successful, simple formats and protocols that drive the Web.
Almost everybody here seems to be missing the point: RDF isn't for you--it's for your computer. The point of RDF and the Semantic Web is to structure knowledge so that programs can interact with one another to perform better, even in some cases simulating intelligent decisions. Unless you're working in developing Semantic Web technology, you should never have to look at an RDF document.
It's not a wiki. It's not a new way to see metadata. It's your softwares' version of the WWW.
It's not always about you humans.
1) people like to masturbate.
2) some people like to look at pictures of naked girls while masturbating.
3) some people like to think about graph theory while masturbating.
The semantic web is the unfortunate result of #3.
Now, while I have no problem with any of these behaviors, I do ask that people in group #2 to keep their sticky dirty magazines under their bed, not on their coffee tables; and people in group #3 to likewise keep their inventions locked in the closet, and not release them to standards bodies or working groups.
So when you see someone in a clear frenzy of sexual excitement talking to you about "ontologies" and "reification", simply smile politely, and call the police.
Remember, these people are the exception, not the norm, in an otherwise healthy society.