On 5/26/11 1:15 PM, John F. Sowa wrote:
> On 5/26/2011 11:38 AM, Zhuk, Yefim wrote:
>> From technology perspectives, I'd think of Semantic Web as a chain
>> of beautiful ideas: Internet - Web Links - Linked Data - Distributed
>> and Linked Knowledge.
> I have no quarrel with that point. And as I said many times, I was
> enthusiastic about the potential for the SW back in 1998.
>
> But what bothers me is that they ignored a huge number of other *very*
> beautiful ideas, which were just as important as the ones above and
> which desperately needed to be integrated with the above:
>
> 1. When the SW was just getting off the ground, every commercial web
> site was organized around a relational database. Big ones used
> Oracle or DB2, and little ones used LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL,
> and Perl, Python, or PHP). Instead of bringing that technology
> into the SW paradigm, the SW ignored it and made their technology
> incompatible with it. (01)
Initially, yes, but today you have middleware solutions that produce
Linked Data Views over relational data sources. There's even an R2RML
[1] effort from the W3C to standardize this effort. That said, I grasp
the context of your gripe. This should have been one of the first areas
of total emphasis back in the day. It took a long time for SPARQL to
emerge from the W3C's Semantic Web project, relative to the inaugural
Semantic Web article in Scientific America. (02)
> 2. The VLDB (Very Large Data Base) conferences started in 1975.
> By 2000, they had a quarter century of outstanding R& D on every
> beautiful idea in the SW. In addition, they had contributions
> from every major branch of computer science and technology.
> They had addressed *and* presented excellent solutions to the
> problems of integrating RDBs, OODBs, and triple stores. And
> they addressed every issue of integrating semantics with all
> of the above. Unfortunately, the major DB vendors ignored
> most of the VLDB research because it would make their highly
> profitable software obsolete. But it was *exactly* the kind
> of research that the SW needed. (03)
Yep! And we continue to pound that door via SemData meme [2][3]. Ditto
decoupling concept of Linked Data from RDF. (04)
> 3. Also by 2000, AI had over 40 years of R& D on every beautiful
> idea in the SW plus much, much more. The obvious notation for
> triples was LISP: (A B C). But the Semantic Webbers complained
> that LISP had too many parentheses. Not only did they make their
> formats incompatible with all the R& D in AI, they replaced the
> beautiful (A B C) notation with the ugliest and most inefficient
> notation ever inflicted on poor innocent programmers.
>
> 4. UML was very widely used for mainstream commercial software and
> database design. The UML diagrams already represented the most
> widely used aspects of OWL, and they could have been adopted and
> elaborated as the basis for displaying and developing ontologies.
> Today, many people are finally turning to UML as an alternative
> to the SW formats. But the SW should have started with UML-style
> diagrams from the beginning.
>
> 5. Finally, there's a little box called logic in the SW layer cakes,
> but the foundation is pure syntax. And syntax overwhelmed the
> logic. When the SW was founded, KIF was widely accepted as the
> major logic-based format for ontology, there were many tools
> available, and there was an ISO project to standardize KIF and
> CGs as a foundation for Common Logic. But the SW ignored that
> just as quickly as they ignored every other beautiful idea. (05)
Yes, and I am hoping (fingers very much crossed) that lessons have been
learned from these snafus.
>> The big thing for SW was the brand itself and its promotion.
> Yes, but a more accurate term is "hype machine". They adopted
> Tim B-L for his name and reputation, but the W3C was supposed
> to be a "democratic" committee. That means they made technical
> decisions by voting.
>
> There were many very intelligent people in the W3C who were familiar
> with every one of the five points above. But all the intelligent
> people had their own special areas of interest. As a result, they
> tended to go in different directions or squabble among themselves,
> while the voting caused the results to degenerate to the lowest
> common denominator.
>
> In summary, I agree that many of the starting ideas were beautiful,
> but the committee design ended up as an incredibly ugly mess that
> killed a beautiful opportunity to integrate all semantic systems. (06)
Amen! (07)
But all isn't lost, I really believe that via Linked Data Graphs the
critical foundation opens up for much broader participation that truly
works the broader tech continuum. It's going to happen since you can
never really hold a good thing down! (08)
Links: (09)
1. http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-r2rml-20110324/ - R2RML spec
2. http://semdata.org/events/2010/vldb
3.
http://www.openlinksw.com/dataspace/oerling/weblog/Orri%20Erling%27s%20Blog/1614 (010)
-- a report from SemData and VLDB event
4. http://semdata.org/sites/default/files/SemDataSofiaFinalReport.pdf --
official SemData and VLDB event report .
> 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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