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Re: RDF (and RSS?) for the "future Web"
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Silvio Porcellana
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Jan 19, 2001 09:45 PST
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Aaron Swartz ha scritto:
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Well, it's my opinion (which many disagree with) that the vast quantity of
resource out there are not going to be made into semantically-enhanced
systems. People just don't want to do it. Instead, if they are ever
converted, they will be the last to come. The first thing, and that which
will really allow the Web to take off is that of big corporations which
already have large quantities of data in databases and other such systems.
What's needed is a vocabulary for them to express this information and place
it on the Web. What we're doing is we're unlocking the databases that
already exists, and stringing them together. Once people see how well this
works, new databases will be created expressly for the Web. It's basically
the shovelware idea...
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Aaron
I think that you are making a good point is saying that most of the web
"publishers" out there (nowadays almost everybody has a site...) don't
really want to add semantic to their systems. That's probably a laziness
or ignorance issue, that could be faced with a set of easy tools and
even more information about the semantic web.
Anyway, this is the situation. Still, I'm not really sure that the
"top-down" mechanism you depict is the best one, and for a set of
reasons:
- the web is the evidence than a community of users can produce better
and more widely accepted standards than bigger companies. Usually, big
firms *fight* to affirm *their* standard, while a democratic community
usually *works* to produce the *best* standard
- what tells you that big companies will be happy to "open" their
databases to the rest of us? They could add all the possible semantic to
*their* data, but what advantage would we have if that data remains
closed?
- in the end, I still think that "out there" (on the web) there is a lot
of very interesting information, and it would be really a shame to throw
all that away.
Therefore, I believe that the work for a semantic web should more in the
direction of adding semantic meaning to what we have, even if publishers
cannot be always trusted and content is quite difficult to "understand"
(from a machine point of view). But, after all, all revolutions have a
"bottom-up" structure! (I know that this is a quite romantic view of
history...)
In this sense, RSS could be really helpful especially if used as a mean
to describe sites (that therefore would become "resources" with
"concepts" and "ideas", rather than just a collection of linked pages).
Bye!
P.S.: I hope I'm not saying too many stupid things...
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