Software Engineering is required if you actually want anything functional.
Otherwise all you get is words which is what we mostly have now. (01)
Ron (02)
Александр Шкотин wrote:
> Dear Max,
>
> thank you for very interesting article,
> but IMHO SemWeb is not about software engineering. It is about
> knowledge engineering.
> So it is not for programmers at all.
> And roughly say - it's forbidden for programmer to create ontology, as
> we just get another piece of code;)
> that what we really have now in many cases:)
>
> Best regards,
>
> Alex
>
>
>
> 2008/8/13 Michael Maximilien <mmaximilien@xxxxxxxxx
> <mailto:mmaximilien@xxxxxxxxx>>
>
> Dear John et al.,
>
> As a long time passive casual reader of this list and having even
> participated in some ONTOLOG sessions in the past (circa 2005), I
> first want to say that I always appreciate your posts. They are
> always clear and full of wisdom.
>
> I found this one to be particular thoughtful, pragmatic, and to the
> point. Like you, I too am also of the opinion that the Semantic Web
> community has made a series of mistakes at the architecture, design,
> and implementation as well as business level, which are likely to
> prevent it (and associated technologies) from ever going mainstream on
> the Web.
>
> As a new researcher and observer of what goes on related to the Web in
> Silicon Valley, I was quickly brought down to earth in 2004 when I
> tried to sell and show early efforts and research in Semantic Web.
>
> Upon a deeper (though casual) analysis of the reality in the valley
> and going back to my software engineering roots, I came to the
> realization, like you, that Semantic Web technologies and artifacts
> are simply not meshing well with Web technologies. However, unlike
> your excellent DB-focused analysis, mine was around Software
> Engineering and in particular the lack of agility in Semantic Web
> tools and technologies.
>
> Web developers want quick and malleable results that they can quickly
> show to their stakeholders. The reason is simply that with the
> Internet, software cycles are shorter and shorter. To stay in
> business, companies and developers must show completely working
> systems soon, otherwise clients move on. Agility is paramount.
> Frameworks like Ruby on Rails, PHP/Zend, and Python/Django have gained
> wide acceptance and popularity in recent months (past 36 months or so)
> primarily due to their uncanny ability to get you up and running on
> the Web in a matter of hours, not days. You simply need an idea, a
> relational database, and a server, and a few hours of programming.
>
> Indeed many of the mushrooming Facebook applications and other hot Web
> 2.0 and 2.x applications are now done in these frameworks over
> weekends here in the valley... With cloud computing, the database and
> the servers requirements are themselves becoming commodities that you
> can pay for by the hour---only increasing the pressures to have quick
> and agile development.
>
> Semantic Web, and various aspects of initial versions of Web services
> for that matter, required heavy tooling or 'big up front designs"
> which are antithesis to the core virtues of the Web. That with the
> fact that they mostly ignored the staying power and value of the
> relational data model, made them unknown and heavy to developers. The
> return on such huge up front investment to use Semantic Web tools is
> simply too big to justify the minimal returns...
>
> Additionally, in my opinion, the Achilles heels of the Semantic Web
> was maybe the fact the designers seemingly ignored one of the reasons
> of the Web's success. The simple fact fact that with minimal
> protocols (HTTP and few others) and few up front agreements (HTML and
> others) the Web allowed anyone, anywhere to publish and create
> applications... Yes that leads to a plethora of duplicated data and
> semantics, but that's fine as, in the end, it also follows how humans
> naturally do things.
>
> Human civilizations has seen various repeated technologies and tools
> over centuries. The Chinese initially invented many technologies that
> the west re-invented later on... and now, vice a versa. Why would a
> wold-wide web be any different? If as humans we liked having one
> meaning and representation for domains, we would all speak English,
> Spanish, or Chinese. We don't and in many way this is a great thing
> with lots of benefits, while also creating various drawbacks.
>
> Now, this is not to say that the Web is perfect and that efforts to
> add semantics or making the Web more secure are not needed. It simply
> is a reminder that any mainstream changes on the Web needs to mesh
> with the core values and design choices that have made the Web a
> success. It's no wonder that REST has surpassed SOAP/WSDL for making
> the Web programmable. REST meshes perfectly with the Web's
> architecture; SOAP in many ways, simply does not...
>
> Ajith Ranabahu (PhD student at Wright State University) and I have a
> short paper that summarizes some of this thinking that we presented
> last year at ICSC (http://icsc2007.eecs.uci.edu/). You can find a PDF
> here for your perusal:
> http://maximilien.org/publications/papers/2007/Maximilien+Ranabahu07a.pdf
>
> All in all, I think it's great that every now and then we are able to
> be pragmatic about things and realize our mistakes. I believe that
> this shows strength, confidence, and maturity. I believe many aspects
> and promises from Semantic Web technologies need a bit of that
> pragmatic reminder...
>
> Sincerely yours,
>
> E. Michael Maximilien (aka "max")
> http://maximilien.org
> http://blog.maximilien.org
> IBM Research
> San Jose, CA USA
>
> On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 7:01 AM, John F. Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx
> <mailto:sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
> > Martin,
> >
> > Thanks for the pointers to your papers. I agree with a lot of what
> > you say, but my major concern is that there is much, much more
> to say
> > that goes far beyond what the Semantic Web is currently doing.
> A lot
> > of useful work has been done within the SemWeb paradigm, but my
> major
> > complaint is that it's too provincial. The foundation was
> established
> > without considering the immense amount of mission-critical
> technology
> > that was already available and very widely used.
> >
> > Relational databases are the most obvious technology that was
> omitted.
> > The world economy runs on RDBs, and nearly every major
> commercial web
> > site is integrated with an RDB. For smaller sites, the standard is
> > LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl, Python, or PHP.
> >
> > When RDF(S) was being designed, the obvious approach was to support
> > arbitrary n-tuples. That would have made it trivial to download or
> > upload any or all of an SQL database (or the response from an SQL
> > query) to or from RDF n-tuples. Some people who had a bright idea
> > for implementing "triple stores" thought that they could implement
> > triples faster than n-tuples. But that is not only false, it
> > would be hopelessly nearsighted as a design decision, even if it
> > had a grain of truth.
> >
> > Another weakness is that the designers ignored the major lesson
> > of DB design from the earliest, pre-relational days: a DB without
> > indexing is hopelessly inefficient. Embedding data in web pages
> > is useful for many purposes, but high-speed processing of large
> > volumes of data requires downloading and indexing. (Note Google.)
> >
> > Another limitation is caused by ignoring existing standards.
> > There is an ISO standard for Prolog, but people are still working
> > on an incredibly underpowered version called RuleML. Many major
> > sites routinely download RDF and OWL into Prolog in order to get
> > any kind of reasonable performance. At our company (VivoMind),
> > we download and translate RDF and OWL into Prolog faster than
> > most native processors can do just the download. Then the
> > Prolog version runs circles around the native systems.
> >
> > Prolog is the major language used for immensely large systems
> > that do complex inferences. As just one example, Experian
> > (one of the three major credit bureaus that check everybody's
> > credit worthiness) uses Prolog for all their complex checks.
> > In fact, they use it so much that they bought the Prologia
> > company, which was founded by Alain Colmerauer, the person
> > who first designed and implemented Prolog.
> >
> > There is much more to say, but it's essential for the SemWebbers
> > to recognize that there is an enormous amount of very important
> > theory and technology that must be integrated with the Sem Web
> > before it can reach the high hopes that people had for it. And
> > integration does *not* mean a one-sided mapping of everything
> > outside the Sem Web into XML-based notations.
> >
> > And by the way, I'm pleased that you liked my paper "Fads and
> > Fallacies about Logic." Jim Hendler was the editor of the
> > journal in which it was published, and Jim liked the paper
> > -- despite the fact that he and I have had many arguments
> > over the years about many things (although we occasionally
> > agree about a few).
> >
> > John
> >
> >
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>
> --
> max
> http://maximilien.org
> http://blog.maximilien.com
>
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