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Poor Semantic Web,
though Slashdotters
knew it
long ago (2001/03/21),
things just seems to be worsening...
From Bill Andersen on Sat, 30 Mar 2002 14:43:05 -0600 I believe the WWW-community's "ontology" stuff to be pretty bad, bordering on junk, and dangerous to the goals of the ontology community in general. But it's there and gaining momentum, because they have TOOLS and CODE and EXAMPLES and not just TALK. This community [SUO] had better stop playing academic one-upmanship and get busy producing something before the referent of the word "ontology" gets changed out from under us and we find ourselves in a W3C "re-education" camp, being told the sky is really green in a ceaseless series of pop-up windows on a big screen while our eyes are held open by toothpicks. From John Sowa on Sat, 30 Mar 2002 12:09:55 -0500 They have ignored everything that has been done in AI for the past 40 years. The RDF notation, which was originally designed by R. V. Guha, who was formerly the associate director of Cyc, is a trivial subset of what Cyc was doing in 1984. Guha proposed the version 1.0 of RDF, and he hoped that a much richer language would be developed for version 1.1. But since then, the W3C has been hung up on pursuing such low-level details that Guha withdrew in disgust. He is still on the RDF committee list, but he hasn't participated in any of their work for over two years. From John Sowa on Sat, 30 Mar 2002 20:39:27 -0500 quoting LEO from Sat, 30 Mar 2002 17:31:13 -0500 > Cyc would have been years ahead if it just pursued a FOL agenda at > inception. Many of us knew/know that. And suggested that then. We and > you told them so. But the important point is that they came around. > So this is just old "I told you so"itis. Indeed it is. I was just rehasing that bit of history in order to get the SUMO and RDF people to recognize that they are just redoing what Cyc has been doing for the past 18 years and will undoubtedly continue to do for the next 18+ years if the government keeps shoveling research grants at them. From John Sowa on Mon, 01 Apr 2002 22:32:07 -0500 quoting Jim Hendler from Mon, 1 Apr 2002 16:09:15 -0500 And your own reply to Bill illustrates the problem: > ... When you write classical logic with all the usual symbols it is > meaningless scrawling on a piece of paper until we have the social > agreement about how the symbols map to mathematical concepts. I agree. Now imagine a few billion web pages with hundreds of XML based languages scrawled across them. Each one might have been well designed by itself, and all of them may be processed by a common set of XML tools. But where is the social agreement that relates the XML tags of one notation with its implicit logic and ontology to the XML tags of another notation with a different set of implicit assumptions about logic and ontology? From Erik Larson on Tue, 21 May 2002 17:33:45 -0400 (EDT) * Certainly I won't argue that RDF is perfect. But it's lackluster acceptance among the Web development community thus far might be due to other factors than technical snafus. |