That's broadly the case, but there are a few subtle differences. A three year bachelors degree is typically 180 ECTS credits (ECTS being the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System), and a postgraduate masters is typically 90 ECTS credits (in the UK at least - in some European countries, 120 ECTS credit masters are the norm). A four year undergraduate masters is considered to be a part of the 1st cycle (in Bologna Process terms), and is typically 240 ECTS credits, some 30-60 ECTS short of a bachelors plus a postgraduate masters.
Putting it a different way, we expect our MSc students to work over the summer (carrying out their dissertation projects, submitted in late September), whereas our MEng students finish with their final exams in June of their final year.
Regarding fees, at my place in 2013-14 the tuition fees for an MSc degree were set at £5,500 per year for a UK student studying a non-laboratory subject, which is considerably less than the £9,000 that you'd pay for each year of an undergraduate degree. Of course, the £9k tuition fees are paid upfront by a government-backed loan which may be written off after 25 years, whereas the main funding for postgraduate masters is through career development loans, which typically impose much harsher terms.
Dyson's talking about the UK, where over the last decade and a half we've moved from a higher education system funded from general taxation, to one in which teaching is funded almost entirely through tuition fees. A student studying for a four-year undergraduate masters (typical for engineering subjects in the UK) now faces a debt of £36,000 (US$60,000) for their tuition alone; living expenses (rent, food) will typically add upwards of £20,000 to the overal cost. By contrast, when I graduated with BSc Computer Science in 1994, I did so without debt; my tuition and living expenses were paid for by my local education authority, as was then the norm.
As a result, we're seeing a decline in admissions across science engineering as a whole, and a very pronounced shift from four year MEng degrees to three year BSc/BEng. The decline varies from discipline to discipline; computer science so far seems to have got off quite lightly, but others have been hit much harder (materials science, for example). It's very touching that you believe that the invisible hand is going to make everything better, but the reality is that any correction in engineering salaries is likely to take decades (if not longer), and the shortage of STEM graduates is rather more immediate.
Dyson's arguments are sensible, and effectively take us back to the situation of the early 90s: tuition fees would be paid by the state. He also makes reference to the decline of the post-study work permit system that used to exist in the UK; it used to be the case that overseas students at UK universities would get a two year work permit. This was a boon for UK engineering employers - I've employed several such graduates on my projects. The decisions made by the current UK government (and to a lesser extent to the previous Labour government, for they introduced tuition fees, albeit at a lower level) have been harmful to both UK higher education and to UK science and engineering.
(an explanatory note to the above: I'm a lecturer (US professor) at a research-led UK university, and the coordinator for an undergraduate computer science degree programme - I know what I'm talking about)
Lovelace's contribution lay in her translation and annotation of Menabrea's description of the Analytical Engine, for which she wrote a short program.
Like the Difference Engines, the Analytical Engine was not built during Babbage's (or Lovelace's) lifetime. Unlike the Difference Engine, the Analytical Engine has never been built; the "computer [...] not actually built until 2002" was the Difference Engine No.2, designed by Babbage in the late 1840s, which is a calculator and not a computer. The date of 2002 is also misleading, and refers to the completion of the printer for the DE No.2 (in 2000) that was built by Doron Swade's group at the Science Museum in London between 1989 and 1991.
Furthermore, her husband was not the "Count of Lovelace", but rather the 1st Earl of Lovelace (formerly Lord King, Baron of Ockham, and then Viscount Ockham). 'Count' is not a British title of peerage; her title of countess was therefore the result of her marriage to an earl.
That's not exactly true. The true answer is "Have a marketable sequel planned out" [...] If NASA had said "We're getting to Mars in 15 years. The moon will be merely remembered as our first baby steps by the year 2000." we might have an interesting alternate history -- but it's only regretful musings at this point.
Not true; NASA had a marketable sequel planned, in the form of the Integrated Manned Program. This was presented by NASA to the Space Task Group in 1969, and would have included (in the most agressive plan): an earth to orbit space shuttle (the Integrated Launch and Reentry Vehicle System) in 1975; NERVA-based reusable nuclear shuttles for Earth-Moon transfers, as well as Mars and Venus missions by 1978; a Earth orbit station by 1975; a lunar orbit station by 1976; a lunar surface base by 1978; a fifty-man Earth orbit station by 1980; and a first mission to Mars in 1981.
In short, NASA said "we're getting to Mars in twelve years". Nixon's response was to cut NASA's funding to the level required to support the development of the Space Shuttle.
The story is Arthur C. Clarke's 1954 short Silence Please, included in his anthology Tales from the White Hart.
The science isn't too bad; this is essentially how noise-cancelling headphones work.
what annoys me is that whenever the British government/local government or other British institutions put this sort of information online here in the UK - they expect to be able to charge for it (our taxes paid for the running of these institutions etc)...
This is a consequence of the decision to devolve the management of certain parts of government and give them what is known as trading fund status. Effectively, these have different financial arrangements to other parts of government. To quote from here:
Each is an arms-length trading organisation but with a duty to observe specific financial targets set by the Treasury and involving capital returns, borrowing and transparency of reporting. They must also deliver quality standards and fitness for purpose in their products and services within government policy.
The best-known example of a trading fund (some might say most notorious) is Ordnance Survey, the UK mapping agency.
During the standardisation process, a standard evolves through discussion and debate, as does the terminology used in it. In W3C, much of this discussion happens on email, but there's also a weekly plenary telecon where votes may be taken. The discussion is multi-threaded and interdependent; a WG may have several dozen open issues at any given time, and a resolution of one of these issues may have ramifications for the other issues. This is especially true when a WG is trying to reconcile the requirements of more than one user community. Standardisation is compromise, and most of the time you can't fit in all the features that every user wants and still have something that's implementable. An example of such a compromise (that I was involved in) was the selection of the language features for OWL Lite/DL; add too many, or the wrong combination, and you've got a knowledge representation language for which there exists no sound, complete and decidable reasoning procedure.
You can see what I'm talking about if you look at the mailing lists for any of the larger WGs. At its peak, a WG like webont or html produces 500+ mails a month. This may not seem like much, but these were part of a deeply technical ongoing discussion, and tend to be bursty. Miss a week's mail, and you'll not easily be able to follow what's being discussed until you've caught up, nor understand how work on other issues affects your work.
The cost of membership in W3C may be as low as USD6k, but the cost of participation is much higher. I've been a member of two W3C working groups, and they've both taken a day each week to keep up-to-date on developments. Add in the cost of face-to-face meetings, and any organisation that expects to actively participate in the W3C will be facing a much higher cost (including staff time, etc) than the $6k figure you quote.
These photographs taken by one of my colleagues, which have been linked elsewhere from this topic, clearly show the structure c. 1600 yesterday. The BBC photographs were taken before noon, while the 200m cordon was still in place around the building.
The bulk of the flammable chemicals were stored in an outbuilding. In particular, the external hydrogen store was not affected by the fire, having been upwind of the building.
ps: "despise", not "dispise" (sic). Hope this helps.
The Mountbatten building is the office block adjacent to the clean rooms. It's badly damaged, but there's more of it left than there is of the clean rooms, which are a blackened shell.
The building that was destroyed (the clean rooms) is the one behind the white van, and the Mountbatten building (badly damaged) is the grey building behind the clean rooms. The Zepler building, the white building to the right of the clean rooms, is undamaged.
The building was of steel-frame construction with aluminium cladding. If you were to look at any of the photographs, this is quite clear, since the structure is visible. The building contained substantial amounts of flammable chemicals used in the fabrication processes carried out there, which had much to do with the intensity of the fire.
The people who designed and ran this facility were not fools, as you seem to be suggesting. Get a clue.
This is as good of a reason as any why research information and data should be made publicly avialable and redistributable, for redundancacy purposes and also to further innovation.
Coincidentally, The School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton is at the forefront of the worldwide movement towards institutional archiving of research with their EPrints Project.
I'm a lecturer at ECS. The fire has destroyed the clean rooms, including the chip and fibre fabrication facilities, and has severely damaged the top two floors of the Mountbatten building. The lower two floors of Mountbatten are likely to have suffered some smoke and water damage, but the situation is generally more optimistic there. The Zepler building has not been damaged, but we're not being let back in until Wednesday at the earliest due to the possibility of residual environmental hazards.
I was a student in the AI department at Edinburgh a few years before the fire there. The library was that of Department of Artificial Intelligence, which later became part of the Division of Informatics. The library has never been known as the "Cybernetic Library" (the ALA article is incorrect), and was rather older than 17 years (the collection was the best part of fifty years old). As an aside, the "scan and burn" mentality is entirely unhelpful in situations like this.
The fire took place in the offices on South Bridge, which consisted of a converted department store, which was built on top of a mish-mash of other buildings, some parts of which dated back to the C17th. The nightclub (The Gilded Balloon) was located on Cowgate, under South Bridge. There were no student flats in that building; the nearest residences were at College Wynd and Guthrie Street, some 50m further up Cowgate.
To some extent, I agree with you. I've seen quite a few systems with n-ary links, but I've yet to see a convincing interface that lets the user select which of the link endpoints they wish to visit without imposing an unacceptable cognitive overhead.
The closest I've seen are n-ary links which when traversed present the user with a composite document made up of the link endpoints - think of a link which opens multiple tabs in a browser. All those which force the user to choose a destination from a menu or an intermediate link page (like the Wiki example that was the subject of this article) force the user to make that choice without a great deal of information. Titles, bibliographic metadata and even excerpts don't necessarily give users what they need to discriminate between the endpoints.
Ideally, the hypertext system should be able to select the most appropriate endpoint from an n-ary link based on the user's browsing history and context. One of the other commenters on this article gave a good example from the Wiki world where this would be a real benefit, namely the proliferation of disambiguation pages in Wikipedia et al. If you're reading a page on chemical structures and you follow a link marked "orbital", you should be taken to a page about electrons, and not even see that there's a page about a musician of that name unless you explicitly ask for it. There's a lot of research on topics related to this in the adaptive hypermedia community.
links are not, and never were, supposed to work like that
You're incorrect. The hypertext research community, particularly that part which deals with open hypermedia (where links are stored separately from documents) have considered links with multiple targets, or n-ary links, to be a useful navigational structure. This dates back at least as far as Ted Nelson's Xanadu from the 1960s, and has featured in a number of later systems, including Microcosm, Hyper-G/Hyper-Wave, and the W3C Xlink specification.
The Web may be the most widespread hypertext system, but the model of hypertext embodied by the A element is very simple, consisting of embedded unidirectional one-way links. XLink was a W3C attempt to remedy this which has so far failed to gain any noticeable support, but the W3C Annotea system could trivially be expanded to support first-class n-ary links.
I disagree in part. The semantics aspect was as big a concern then as now, but it's important to recognise when the representational requirements of an application require the use of OWL (or DAML+OIL), or when you can get away with the use of RDFS only. It's all about choosing the most appropriate tool for the job.
Regarding the timing of SWC2003 and the publication of the OWL Recommendation, OWL made Proposed Recommendation in December 2003 and Recommendation in 2004 (this being largely a rubber-stamping step). However, the major building blocks of the language had been in place since the publication of the Last Call Working Draft in March 2003, and the similarity of OWL to its lineal predecessor DAML+OIL meant that most people with DAML+OIL software and ontologies were able to adapt with less effort than if they were to have started from scratch.
For OWL to have passed Candidate Recommendation, the working group needed to demonstrate that there were sufficient implementations of the language in the form of reasoners, etc, one of which was FaCT. At that point, FaCT was a mature DL reasoner that was developed for OIL and had already been adapted for DAML+OIL.
Tap doesn't appear to have an ontology (OWL or RDFS) that's published separately to the RDF data, but the RDF data files do appear to contain class definitions. In my book, that's sufficient meaning to qualify as a SW application under the rules laid down by the SW Challenge. It's certainly about as much meaning as we had in CS AKTive Space when we won the first SW Challenge in 2003.
WebFountain works by converting the myriad ways information is presented online into a uniform, structured format that can then be analyzed. The goal is to provide a general-purpose platform that can allow any number of so-called analytic tools to sift the structured data for patterns and trends. Creating the needed structure automatically is WebFountain's big advance, because it requires at least some understanding of what the information actually means.
WebFountain complements the Semantic Web, rather than competes with it; it's primarily about information extraction or knowledge acquisition, which is something that SW researchers like myself recognise as an issue with some of the SW rhetoric.
The examples of the "uniform structured format" given in the article are arbitrary pieces of XML markup, but this could as easily be RDF or OWL. Adopting SW technologies would benefit WebFountain by providing a foundation for defining the meaning of the common structured format (using the model-theoretic semantics for RDF or OWL) and expressing domain- and task-specific vocabularies or ontologies that can be used in the semantic annotation of the unstructured data.
If there's one thing that the past two decades of knowledge engineering research have taught us, it's that the one-size-fits-all ontology is a myth, despite what Doug Lenat may claim. The characterisation of the SW environment as one in which everyone agrees on a single common tag set is not a vision of the SW that I recognise!
It's not that most interpreters don't support OWL Full, but that there are no tractable, sound and complete algorithms for subsumption reasoning in the logic that underpins OWL Full. If you write OWL DL there are restrictions on what you can express, but you do then have tractable algorithms. It's the tradeoff between expressivity and complexity, in short.
SHOE was primarily the result of Jeff Heflin's PhD research, and he used his experiences of writing SHOE to good effect on the W3C's Web Ontology Working Group (which produced OWL, based on the DAML+OIL language).
re: the embedding of SW data into web pages, there's a specification currently called RDF/A in the works at W3C that describes an XHTML-based serialisation for RDF data that will address the long-standing issue of embedding RDF metadata into web pages.
(I must declare an interest here, since I was also a member of WebOnt)
I agree with you completely on this point. The most important advances that have been made in the knowledge engineering community over the last decade have been those that have tried to fuse non-symbolic and machine learning techniques with the good old-fashioned AI of expert systems.
Slashdot Mirror
That's broadly the case, but there are a few subtle differences. A three year bachelors degree is typically 180 ECTS credits (ECTS being the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System), and a postgraduate masters is typically 90 ECTS credits (in the UK at least - in some European countries, 120 ECTS credit masters are the norm). A four year undergraduate masters is considered to be a part of the 1st cycle (in Bologna Process terms), and is typically 240 ECTS credits, some 30-60 ECTS short of a bachelors plus a postgraduate masters.
Putting it a different way, we expect our MSc students to work over the summer (carrying out their dissertation projects, submitted in late September), whereas our MEng students finish with their final exams in June of their final year.
Regarding fees, at my place in 2013-14 the tuition fees for an MSc degree were set at £5,500 per year for a UK student studying a non-laboratory subject, which is considerably less than the £9,000 that you'd pay for each year of an undergraduate degree. Of course, the £9k tuition fees are paid upfront by a government-backed loan which may be written off after 25 years, whereas the main funding for postgraduate masters is through career development loans, which typically impose much harsher terms.
Dyson's talking about the UK, where over the last decade and a half we've moved from a higher education system funded from general taxation, to one in which teaching is funded almost entirely through tuition fees. A student studying for a four-year undergraduate masters (typical for engineering subjects in the UK) now faces a debt of £36,000 (US$60,000) for their tuition alone; living expenses (rent, food) will typically add upwards of £20,000 to the overal cost. By contrast, when I graduated with BSc Computer Science in 1994, I did so without debt; my tuition and living expenses were paid for by my local education authority, as was then the norm. As a result, we're seeing a decline in admissions across science engineering as a whole, and a very pronounced shift from four year MEng degrees to three year BSc/BEng. The decline varies from discipline to discipline; computer science so far seems to have got off quite lightly, but others have been hit much harder (materials science, for example). It's very touching that you believe that the invisible hand is going to make everything better, but the reality is that any correction in engineering salaries is likely to take decades (if not longer), and the shortage of STEM graduates is rather more immediate. Dyson's arguments are sensible, and effectively take us back to the situation of the early 90s: tuition fees would be paid by the state. He also makes reference to the decline of the post-study work permit system that used to exist in the UK; it used to be the case that overseas students at UK universities would get a two year work permit. This was a boon for UK engineering employers - I've employed several such graduates on my projects. The decisions made by the current UK government (and to a lesser extent to the previous Labour government, for they introduced tuition fees, albeit at a lower level) have been harmful to both UK higher education and to UK science and engineering. (an explanatory note to the above: I'm a lecturer (US professor) at a research-led UK university, and the coordinator for an undergraduate computer science degree programme - I know what I'm talking about)
Lovelace's contribution lay in her translation and annotation of Menabrea's description of the Analytical Engine, for which she wrote a short program. Like the Difference Engines, the Analytical Engine was not built during Babbage's (or Lovelace's) lifetime. Unlike the Difference Engine, the Analytical Engine has never been built; the "computer [...] not actually built until 2002" was the Difference Engine No.2, designed by Babbage in the late 1840s, which is a calculator and not a computer. The date of 2002 is also misleading, and refers to the completion of the printer for the DE No.2 (in 2000) that was built by Doron Swade's group at the Science Museum in London between 1989 and 1991. Furthermore, her husband was not the "Count of Lovelace", but rather the 1st Earl of Lovelace (formerly Lord King, Baron of Ockham, and then Viscount Ockham). 'Count' is not a British title of peerage; her title of countess was therefore the result of her marriage to an earl.
That's not exactly true. The true answer is "Have a marketable sequel planned out" [...] If NASA had said "We're getting to Mars in 15 years. The moon will be merely remembered as our first baby steps by the year 2000." we might have an interesting alternate history -- but it's only regretful musings at this point.
Not true; NASA had a marketable sequel planned, in the form of the Integrated Manned Program. This was presented by NASA to the Space Task Group in 1969, and would have included (in the most agressive plan): an earth to orbit space shuttle (the Integrated Launch and Reentry Vehicle System) in 1975; NERVA-based reusable nuclear shuttles for Earth-Moon transfers, as well as Mars and Venus missions by 1978; a Earth orbit station by 1975; a lunar orbit station by 1976; a lunar surface base by 1978; a fifty-man Earth orbit station by 1980; and a first mission to Mars in 1981.
In short, NASA said "we're getting to Mars in twelve years". Nixon's response was to cut NASA's funding to the level required to support the development of the Space Shuttle.
The story is Arthur C. Clarke's 1954 short Silence Please, included in his anthology Tales from the White Hart. The science isn't too bad; this is essentially how noise-cancelling headphones work.
This is a consequence of the decision to devolve the management of certain parts of government and give them what is known as trading fund status. Effectively, these have different financial arrangements to other parts of government. To quote from here:
The best-known example of a trading fund (some might say most notorious) is Ordnance Survey, the UK mapping agency.
During the standardisation process, a standard evolves through discussion and debate, as does the terminology used in it. In W3C, much of this discussion happens on email, but there's also a weekly plenary telecon where votes may be taken. The discussion is multi-threaded and interdependent; a WG may have several dozen open issues at any given time, and a resolution of one of these issues may have ramifications for the other issues. This is especially true when a WG is trying to reconcile the requirements of more than one user community. Standardisation is compromise, and most of the time you can't fit in all the features that every user wants and still have something that's implementable. An example of such a compromise (that I was involved in) was the selection of the language features for OWL Lite/DL; add too many, or the wrong combination, and you've got a knowledge representation language for which there exists no sound, complete and decidable reasoning procedure.
You can see what I'm talking about if you look at the mailing lists for any of the larger WGs. At its peak, a WG like webont or html produces 500+ mails a month. This may not seem like much, but these were part of a deeply technical ongoing discussion, and tend to be bursty. Miss a week's mail, and you'll not easily be able to follow what's being discussed until you've caught up, nor understand how work on other issues affects your work.
The cost of membership in W3C may be as low as USD6k, but the cost of participation is much higher. I've been a member of two W3C working groups, and they've both taken a day each week to keep up-to-date on developments. Add in the cost of face-to-face meetings, and any organisation that expects to actively participate in the W3C will be facing a much higher cost (including staff time, etc) than the $6k figure you quote.
These photographs taken by one of my colleagues, which have been linked elsewhere from this topic, clearly show the structure c. 1600 yesterday. The BBC photographs were taken before noon, while the 200m cordon was still in place around the building.
The bulk of the flammable chemicals were stored in an outbuilding. In particular, the external hydrogen store was not affected by the fire, having been upwind of the building.
ps: "despise", not "dispise" (sic). Hope this helps.
Dude, I don't believe that I've told you that you rock today. :)
The Mountbatten building is the office block adjacent to the clean rooms. It's badly damaged, but there's more of it left than there is of the clean rooms, which are a blackened shell.
Actually, we do, but there's only one of them, and it's safe in the building which didn't burn down ;)
(I wish I was joking about this)
The building that was destroyed (the clean rooms) is the one behind the white van, and the Mountbatten building (badly damaged) is the grey building behind the clean rooms. The Zepler building, the white building to the right of the clean rooms, is undamaged.
The building was slightly over fifteen years old (completed between 1988 and 1989)
The building was of steel-frame construction with aluminium cladding. If you were to look at any of the photographs, this is quite clear, since the structure is visible. The building contained substantial amounts of flammable chemicals used in the fabrication processes carried out there, which had much to do with the intensity of the fire.
The people who designed and ran this facility were not fools, as you seem to be suggesting. Get a clue.
Coincidentally, The School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton is at the forefront of the worldwide movement towards institutional archiving of research with their EPrints Project.
I'm a lecturer at ECS. The fire has destroyed the clean rooms, including the chip and fibre fabrication facilities, and has severely damaged the top two floors of the Mountbatten building. The lower two floors of Mountbatten are likely to have suffered some smoke and water damage, but the situation is generally more optimistic there. The Zepler building has not been damaged, but we're not being let back in until Wednesday at the earliest due to the possibility of residual environmental hazards.
I was a student in the AI department at Edinburgh a few years before the fire there. The library was that of Department of Artificial Intelligence, which later became part of the Division of Informatics. The library has never been known as the "Cybernetic Library" (the ALA article is incorrect), and was rather older than 17 years (the collection was the best part of fifty years old). As an aside, the "scan and burn" mentality is entirely unhelpful in situations like this. The fire took place in the offices on South Bridge, which consisted of a converted department store, which was built on top of a mish-mash of other buildings, some parts of which dated back to the C17th. The nightclub (The Gilded Balloon) was located on Cowgate, under South Bridge. There were no student flats in that building; the nearest residences were at College Wynd and Guthrie Street, some 50m further up Cowgate.
To some extent, I agree with you. I've seen quite a few systems with n-ary links, but I've yet to see a convincing interface that lets the user select which of the link endpoints they wish to visit without imposing an unacceptable cognitive overhead.
The closest I've seen are n-ary links which when traversed present the user with a composite document made up of the link endpoints - think of a link which opens multiple tabs in a browser. All those which force the user to choose a destination from a menu or an intermediate link page (like the Wiki example that was the subject of this article) force the user to make that choice without a great deal of information. Titles, bibliographic metadata and even excerpts don't necessarily give users what they need to discriminate between the endpoints.
Ideally, the hypertext system should be able to select the most appropriate endpoint from an n-ary link based on the user's browsing history and context. One of the other commenters on this article gave a good example from the Wiki world where this would be a real benefit, namely the proliferation of disambiguation pages in Wikipedia et al. If you're reading a page on chemical structures and you follow a link marked "orbital", you should be taken to a page about electrons, and not even see that there's a page about a musician of that name unless you explicitly ask for it. There's a lot of research on topics related to this in the adaptive hypermedia community.
You're incorrect. The hypertext research community, particularly that part which deals with open hypermedia (where links are stored separately from documents) have considered links with multiple targets, or n-ary links, to be a useful navigational structure. This dates back at least as far as Ted Nelson's Xanadu from the 1960s, and has featured in a number of later systems, including Microcosm, Hyper-G/Hyper-Wave, and the W3C Xlink specification.
The Web may be the most widespread hypertext system, but the model of hypertext embodied by the A element is very simple, consisting of embedded unidirectional one-way links. XLink was a W3C attempt to remedy this which has so far failed to gain any noticeable support, but the W3C Annotea system could trivially be expanded to support first-class n-ary links.
I disagree in part. The semantics aspect was as big a concern then as now, but it's important to recognise when the representational requirements of an application require the use of OWL (or DAML+OIL), or when you can get away with the use of RDFS only. It's all about choosing the most appropriate tool for the job.
Regarding the timing of SWC2003 and the publication of the OWL Recommendation, OWL made Proposed Recommendation in December 2003 and Recommendation in 2004 (this being largely a rubber-stamping step). However, the major building blocks of the language had been in place since the publication of the Last Call Working Draft in March 2003, and the similarity of OWL to its lineal predecessor DAML+OIL meant that most people with DAML+OIL software and ontologies were able to adapt with less effort than if they were to have started from scratch.
For OWL to have passed Candidate Recommendation, the working group needed to demonstrate that there were sufficient implementations of the language in the form of reasoners, etc, one of which was FaCT. At that point, FaCT was a mature DL reasoner that was developed for OIL and had already been adapted for DAML+OIL.
Tap doesn't appear to have an ontology (OWL or RDFS) that's published separately to the RDF data, but the RDF data files do appear to contain class definitions. In my book, that's sufficient meaning to qualify as a SW application under the rules laid down by the SW Challenge. It's certainly about as much meaning as we had in CS AKTive Space when we won the first SW Challenge in 2003.
From the IEEE Spectrum article:
WebFountain complements the Semantic Web, rather than competes with it; it's primarily about information extraction or knowledge acquisition, which is something that SW researchers like myself recognise as an issue with some of the SW rhetoric.
The examples of the "uniform structured format" given in the article are arbitrary pieces of XML markup, but this could as easily be RDF or OWL. Adopting SW technologies would benefit WebFountain by providing a foundation for defining the meaning of the common structured format (using the model-theoretic semantics for RDF or OWL) and expressing domain- and task-specific vocabularies or ontologies that can be used in the semantic annotation of the unstructured data.
If there's one thing that the past two decades of knowledge engineering research have taught us, it's that the one-size-fits-all ontology is a myth, despite what Doug Lenat may claim. The characterisation of the SW environment as one in which everyone agrees on a single common tag set is not a vision of the SW that I recognise!
It's not that most interpreters don't support OWL Full, but that there are no tractable, sound and complete algorithms for subsumption reasoning in the logic that underpins OWL Full. If you write OWL DL there are restrictions on what you can express, but you do then have tractable algorithms. It's the tradeoff between expressivity and complexity, in short.
SHOE was primarily the result of Jeff Heflin's PhD research, and he used his experiences of writing SHOE to good effect on the W3C's Web Ontology Working Group (which produced OWL, based on the DAML+OIL language).
re: the embedding of SW data into web pages, there's a specification currently called RDF/A in the works at W3C that describes an XHTML-based serialisation for RDF data that will address the long-standing issue of embedding RDF metadata into web pages.
(I must declare an interest here, since I was also a member of WebOnt)
I agree with you completely on this point. The most important advances that have been made in the knowledge engineering community over the last decade have been those that have tried to fuse non-symbolic and machine learning techniques with the good old-fashioned AI of expert systems.