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Re: [ontolog-forum] Semantic Enterprise Architecture - Interoperability?

To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2010 08:29:07 -0400
Message-id: <4C878193.5000305@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  On 9/7/10 6:24 PM, John F. Sowa wrote:
> On 9/7/2010 2:16 PM, Pavithra wrote:
>> I believe my reference to the word new for Semantic Interoperability
>> is for web based architecture.
> But the point I was trying to make is that there is nothing new
> about the web.
>
>    1. The idea of combining hypertext with SGML and the Internet
>       addressing scheme was an important innovation in 1991.
>
>    2. The idea of including more semantic markup in documents was
>       also a good idea, but the NLP community was using SGML to
>       annotate documents in the 1980s.
>
>    3. The idea that all the links in documents form a big graph
>       goes back to the semantic networks from the 1960s.
>
>    4. RDF was based on Guha's MCF (MetaContent Facility), which
>       he designed after the left Cyc.  I don't know the full
>       story of his disagreements with Lenat, but I gather that
>       Guha was hoping to develop a notation that was simpler
>       than CycL.
>
>    5. Tim Bray, an XML guru, teamed up with Guha to define RDF
>       as a combination of MCF and XML.  But Tim later admitted
>       that the RDF design was "broken".
>
>    6. Description logics go back to KL-ONE from 1979 and related
>       systems from the 1980s, but the idea of forcing DLs into the
>       RDF straitjacket made many of the DL advocates very unhappy.
>
>    8. People who write RDF don't use the bloated RDF notation.
>       Instead, they use notations that are closer to LISP
>       from 1959.
>
> I'll admit that the SemWeb is big, but that's the result of
> using the Internet and the WWW.  The bloated notations of RDF
> and OWL are a handicap, and anybody who wants to process the
> big stuff has to extract the data from those notations in
> order to get any kind of performance.
>
> In short, there's very little that is new.  And the major
> innovation -- RDF -- was a disaster.  LOD uses RDFa, whose
> only similarity to RDF is in the three letters R-D-F.    (01)

John,    (02)

I agree with most of your comments above, but we need to be a little 
clearer about Linked Data (HTTP URI based hyperdata graphs) and Linked 
Open Data (LOD) which is an application of the Web of Linked Data 
publishing practices espoused in TimBL's meme [1].    (03)

With regards to RDFa -- at the current time -- it isn't the dominant 
markup for publishing Linked Data to the LOD (Linked Open Data) Cloud 
[2], neither is it the markup that bootstrapped LOD. Of course, RDFa 
will ultimately become the markup for publishing Linked Data since it's 
(X)HTML based, thereby natural to Web applications and tools developers.    (04)

LOD bootstrap summary:    (05)

LOD was bootstrapped through DBpedia [3]. This particular project 
deliberately demoted RDF/XML to a negotiated data serialization format 
while producing data sets culled from Wikipedia extraction and 
transformation using N-Triples and N3/Turtle as preferred markup. Most 
important of all, even before RDFa was incorporated in DBpedia, it 
introducted the notion of HTML based entity descriptors, enabling easier 
human readability and exploration of hyperdata graphs via Web Browsers.    (06)

IMHO. The biggest RDF disaster remains the fact that RDF/XML (markup) is 
generally perceived to be the definition of RDF. As you've articulated 
clearly across a myriad of fronts (posts and presentations), a lot of 
these problems are as result of:  overreaching, terminology overloading, 
and bizarre and unnecessary reinvention of terms that completely 
dislocate the critical historic pathways and linkages that are 
fundamental to comprehending any subject matter.    (07)

Yes! There is really absolutely nothing new about RDF or Linked Data. 
Hopefully, people will soon come to understand this :-)    (08)

Links:    (09)

1. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html - TimBL's how to 
publish Linked Data meme
2. http://esw.w3.org/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData 
-- Linked Open Data Community Portal
3. http://dbpedia.org .    (010)


Kingsley
> John
>
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>    (011)


--     (012)

Regards,    (013)

Kingsley Idehen 
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen    (014)






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