Paul, Leo, Jim, Kingsley, and Rich, (01)
I have been working, writing, teaching, and preaching about semantic
technologies for over 40 years. I'm not going to abandon them just
because one system or another is flawed. (02)
PT
> It is a good lesson in what not to do with RDF, and affirms
> what I have always thought about "big bang" transitions in
> general. I completely agree with your and DS's assessments. (03)
I mentioned that example because the mistakes were very clear.
But it illustrates a common problem: A bad decision was made,
a lot of money was invested, reviewers were hired to bless the
decision, and DS tells them something they didn't want to hear. (04)
The usual outcome is that management shoots the messenger, goes
ahead with the plan, and crashes into a train wreck. (05)
> It is not, however, a good argument against my proposition that
> enterprises who invest in URIs will get more utility in the long run
> than those who continue to put all their intellectual property eggs
> only into vendor-controlled baskets. (06)
Nobody argued against URIs. As Matthew said, databases have used
unique identifiers in similar ways since the 1970s. Logicians have
known the importance of identifying and resolving ambiguous terms
since Aristotle. (07)
> I have used RDF to improve or enable processes that would have been
> difficult or impossible to do with some other technology. (08)
Those problems were solved with LISP back in 1959. The chief designer
of RDF was R. V. Guha, who said that he wanted to use LISP notation,
but the W3C forced him to use XML. (09)
PT
> I have not reached or foreseen the limits of [RDF's] utility
> in my current position, but my hand has been stayed in this
> direction and now I can only watch as the conventional non-RDF
> approaches run into trouble. (010)
Now you are talking like the zealot who convinced the IT manager
in the horrible example to switch from Oracle to RDF. (011)
Please note that the schema.org group (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!
and others) have some very intelligent R & D people. They looked
at RDF, but they adopted schema.org instead. They use an approach
that Guha and Bray could have adopted back in 1998: put very simple
HTML tags in web pages and gather all the triples (or N-tuples) in
JSON notation. (And JSON is just LISP with curly braces.) (012)
Leo
> Semantic technologies cannot save you from bad computer science
> and engineering, nor from bad management. (013)
I strongly agree. But I am not just blaming the management. That
horrible example was the result of a zealot who bought the hype
about RDF and convinced the IT manager, who undoubtedly had a
technical background. They should have hired reviewers like DS
while they were still in the design stage. (014)
JR
> This is a good example of technology zealotry, but has little to say about
> the role of semantic technology in conjunction with existing technology... (015)
I agree. But I do blame the W3C for not recognizing the need for
smooth interoperability with existing technology. There were many
very intelligent people on the W3C who had experience with every
branch of AI, comp. science, and comp. systems. (016)
Unfortunately, a committee is the worst place to do innovative design.
But a committee with a broad range of abilities is good for evaluating
different designs. The W3C should have sponsored a design competition
when Tim B-L first proposed the SemWeb back in 1994. Instead, they
put all their eggs in one untried and untested basket. (017)
KI
> No sane entity can afford "rip and replace" .
>
> Co-existence is what everyone needs, build (with minimal disruption)
> upon what already exists. In my experience, it works 100% of the time. (018)
I agree. As I said in my previous note, they could have kept the
highly structured employee data on an RDB, use RDF for web services,
and write software that allows either side to send queries and updates
to the other. DS would have told them that if they had hired him (or
somebody like him) during the design stage. (019)
RC
> But the search for an abstract, anthromathomorphic ontology is, IMHO,
> a lost cause from the beginning. All financial justification is from
> the application up, not from the philosophy down. (020)
Doug Lenat did succeed in persuading people (mostly DoD) to let him
develop such a top down ontology. The Cyc group has been working on
it since 1984 -- almost 28 years. They haven't yet achieved the goals
they had hoped to achieve in 10 years. Among the things they learned
is that it's harder than anyone had thought back in 1984. But it's
worth studying what worked for them, what didn't, and why. (021)
John (022)
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