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Re: RDF (and RSS?) for the "future Web"
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Aaron Swartz
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Jan 19, 2001 14:37 PST
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Silvio Porcellana <spo-@box1.tin.it> wrote:
| | 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.
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People keep on saying this but I don't think it's true -- people don't waste
time on semantic data, even HTML metatags, unless they have good reason to
do so. Perhaps we can provide incentives to include metadata (RSS headline
syndication, good search engine results, etc.) but I doubt that this
metadata will be the content that gets the revolution started. Instead, we
have a chicken and egg problem...where prebuilt database might be able to
solve the issue.
Also note that semantic data means more than metadata and many webpage
writers are not very good at writing databases...however I do see the
possibility of a new class of database managers creating semantic databases,
but this is probably a ways off...
| | - 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
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While I don't know whether the Web is evidence of this, I do agree with this
belief -- however defining the format of the data is different than
providing the data.
| | - 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?
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What advantage is it for a company to have a website?
| | - 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.
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I agree.
| | 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).
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Definitely.
| | P.S.: I hope I'm not saying too many stupid things...
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Nope, not at all.
--
[ Aaron Swartz | m-@aaronsw.com | http://www.aaronsw.com ]
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