On Feb 2, 2009, at 8:35 AM, Steve Newcomb wrote: Nonetheless, Pat, the degree to which oxygen has been removed from the
KM space by RDF's partisans
Nonsense. Or rather, it would be nonsense if it meant anything. , and by decision-makers who ignorantly
credit all the
claims and innuendi of the vendor consortium known as W3C
Its not a vendor consortium. Many of its members are not vendors in any sense (universities, nonprofits) and a lot of its technical work is done by people like me who are not even members of it at all, but give our time to it pro bono in order to help get standards written. Of course, being a standards-setting body for an industry, it has as members the "vendors" of that industry; but among such consortia, the W3C has been distinguished by its on-going commitment to openness in its standards and its processes. The recent lobbying it has performed in defense of maintaining the "open Web" legislation is one illustration of the extent to which the W3C is by no means the slave of its member "vendors". , richly
deserves informed responses, including John's.
Informed criticism is always welcome, especially if it is provided during the last call periods when standards are written but not yet deployed. (John, like several other prominent critics of RDF or OWL, did not comment on them during the last call process.) But saying that anyone who uses RDF does so because a pointy-haired boss has drunk the kool-aid, is not an informed response. Saying that RDF triple stores are inherently inferior to RDB technology is not an informed response. Saying that all projects based on RDF will inevitably lead to disaster is not an informed response. Your characterization of
John's contributions as "almost comically biased" ill serves everyone,
including you. It doesn't really mean anything.
I mean only that their visible bias, and their repetition of vaguely attributed innuendos without citation or even technical justification, has become so repetitious as to be almost amusing. I have given up trying to respond to them rationally, as they are not rational. It's like saying that
John is a "snot-nose". Who isn't a snot-nose?
I'm wondering. Do you claim that there is *any* basis in fact for the
widespread belief, carefully nurtured by W3C partisans
What do you mean by a "partisan" here? The term is political; but the W3C and it has no agenda other than to maintain and extend the Web. (What would a non-partisan be, I wonder? Someone who wants to destroy the Web? A Web freedom fighter?) , that it's
somehow advantageous to treat Web addresses (as opposed to any other
kind of identification mechanism, string-based or otherwise) as proxies
for subjects of conversation?
Proxies? Im not sure what you mean. The "official" position is that URIs (which are not "Web addresses", by the way, but "Web identifiers": they include URNs, for example) are globally unique names, not proxies. So, why does RDF mandate that subject names are URIs? (Actually, URI references, like http://www.example.org/thatOntology#thisThing , where the part before the '#' is a URI.) Because the entire point of RDF is to be a globally comprehensible notation for transmitting formal content, and so the identifiers (names) that it uses have to be at least globally parsable, and known to be globally unique. Suppose RDF had said that a subject name could be any string. Then I might publish some RDF using "motherhood" as a subject, and you might publish some RDF, unbeknownst to me, using that string as a subject, and we might be meaning entirely different things by the string. But then some third party might read both our published RDF and have no idea, particularly after some machine inference has taken place, which of the strings come from your RDF and which originate from my publications. So whatever intended meanings they may have had at the point of publication has been entirely lost when they are transmitted across the Web. URI references are simply globally unique identifiers which avoid this otherwise unavoidable semantic disaster. True, RDF needn't have used URIs. It could have invented its own globally unique system of names and used it. But that would be re-inventing the wheel (in spades). Moreover, the URI naming system has some advantages. First, they provide information about how to use them to access information on the Web (the 'http:' prefix, usually, but it could be any other transfer protocol.) Second, any URI can, from its syntax, be traced to its source. So that name, above, can be traced (using the Web) to the source http://www.example.org, which published the "information resource" (think: RDF document) which presumably defines, or at least constrains, the intended meaning of the name. Names on the Web have owners, and publishers, who are presumed to have intentions, and can be held responsible for what they publish, and to whom errors can be reported; and (uniquely) the name itself can be used to trace its owner. Moreover, its not a great burden to be restricted to URI references in RDF, since any name can be made into a URI reference just by adding a suitable prefix, which is machine-recognizable and can be stripped off when required. In fact there are systems in place for doing this semi-automatically, such as the PURL organization.
You refer to "any other kind of identification mechanism", but the plain fact is that there isn't any other kind which has the same properties. In a real sense, the Web is a global identification system, with some associated communication architecture. And its the only one there is, so far. But you know, if you want to use RDF without using URI references, it would be trivial to adapt it to use other names. Just don't publish the result on the Web, as nobody will understand you.
My own observation, FWIW, is that "the goals of the SWeb" are
indistinguishable from the meta-goal of increasing the power and
influence of the W3C as an institution. Do you know of any factual (as
opposed to merely alleged) basis for any contrary claim?
Yes. My own experience with working with the W3C, including years of fairly intense discussions with virtually everyone in the organization, has not revealed any trace of this "meta-goal", and I defy you to find a single trace of it in any of the W3C archives, including any of the emails of all the working groups, the IM records of the WG meetings, etc., all of which are archived and open for public inspection. (The very accusation reeks of paranoia, to be honest. Do you believe there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy?) The W3C has almost no power at all, and runs on a shoestring budget. The only influence it has comes from its having been the organization which has, for better or worse, created the standards which do in fact make the Web work. The SWeb has nothing whatever to do with increasing the power and influence of the W3C: it is aimed at making a new kind of Web use possible, one that we all hope will produce exciting new applications. (If it will increase power and influence at all, it will be those of organizations which are getting the major funding and producing the exciting research, such as the University of Oxford and the DERI research center in Ireland.) But it will do so only if everyone agrees to work with the standards, and if you don't like them, to work towards improving them. I actually do rather like RDF, though it can certainly be improved (and Im working on that now), and I really do not like OWL. But I still use it and even develop tools for it, because it is in fact the standard. Just trashing standards, or the standards-setting organization, doesn't help anyone. It certainly doesn't help get a better SWeb off the ground.
Pat Hayes
Pat Hayes wrote: On Feb 1, 2009, at 1:55 PM, John F. Sowa wrote:
... his standard, and by now getting rather repetitive, passionate and
almost comically biassed diatribe against RDF and OWL and XML and
anything to do with the Semantic Web. Of course, his small company is
free to adopt the operational strategy which suits them best. From
what I know of VivoMind, their core business does not appear to be
closely related to the goals of the SWeb. However, other small (and
some large) companies appear to disagree with him about RDF . As one
example, take a look at MindCite.
I point this out not in a spirit of criticism but only to provide some
reassurance to those who might find SW technology of interest. As on
a number of other topics, John's views are both idiosyncratic and very
starkly stated, admitting of very little discussion or debate. I am
not particularly fond of OWL myself, but to attribute all uses of it
to pointy-haired bosses who have drunk the kool-aid is misleading, and
indeed something of an insult to a large number of very smart people
of my acquaintance.
Pat
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