Slashdot Mirror
A New Data Model for the Web
An anonymous reader writes "Adam Bosworth delivered what
could be considered a seminal lecture (mp3) at the last MySQL conference about a new data model
for the web, why the plain HTML web succeeded, and why XQuery or the
Semantic web are failures. He is emphatic that RSS 2.0/Atom are the
next big thing and represent the new data model for the web. The audio
is rather long at forty plus minutes and there are a few
places
where the
talk has been covered."
Semantic web is perhaps best described as a framework. I totally agree that it's a pointless comparison. RDF/RDFS and OWL build upon XML so it would make more sense to say that RSS could be a building block for further extensions on the semantic web using for example OWL to represent data.
One of the reasons it appears to move along so slowly now is that the research is handling a lot of issues and as van Harmelen has said, they're afraid to enter the same pitfalls as the research in artificial intelligence where there has been a lot of buzz, but not many concrete results. That's not to say that there aren't any issues with the semantic web, but it's still coming along. OWL is being extended with OWL-S and OWL-QL and the issues of security and privacy are being looked at. Besides, even though ontologies are a new development on the web, they are nothing new overall, something I guess AI researches can testify to.
Recommended book for those who want to extend your knowledge on SW A Semantic Web Primer