On 3/1/2012 6:30 PM, Michael Brunnbauer wrote:
> I think you gave a good example of a problem that Tim B-L was trying to solve
> and that was solved in a reasonable time frame with probable impact on
> society: Talking about all sorts of things in a way that the major search
> engines can understand it better: (01)
But none of the major search engines use any of the tools or notations
developed for the Semantic Web. (02)
> Why do you think schema.org is not about URI based triples and something
> in contrast to RDF ? (03)
Partly because the chief designer of RDF, R. V. Guha, who now works
on schema.org at Google, said explicitly "Somehow RDF never caught on,
but RDFa is here to stay." Furthermore, the recommended notation for
tagging web pages for schema.org is not RDF or RDFa. They use a simpler
notation that they map to JSON, which is a more compact notation that
supports n-tuples and typed n-tuples. (04)
> What has JSON to do with schema.org ? I can't find anything about JSON there. (05)
The tags designed for schema.org can be mapped to many different kinds
of notations, including RDF. The three founding members of schema.org
were Google, Microsoft (Bing), and Yahoo! I don't know the details of
what Bing and Yahoo! are doing, but the prime mover was Google -- and
their tools are designed around JSON as the base notation. (06)
Google is also a very heavy user of JavaScript (actually the ECMAScript
standard). It's simple and efficient for them (or anybody else) to
use JSON as the primary notation. They also use XML, but not RDF --
except when they are given RDF from some non-Google source. (07)
RDF proponents say that RDFa was designed to be mapped to RDF.
That is true, and I admit that there are features of RDF and RDFS
that RDFa was explicitly designed to support. But schema.org does
not use those features. (08)
I also admit that many different notations (including JSON) can be
mapped to RDF. But the RDF/XML is much more bloated and inefficient.
None of the search engines (or anybody else who needs performance)
would use RDF/XML. JSON is humanly readable, efficient for computers,
and general enough to support both relational DBs and graph-based DBs. (09)
> Of course, schema.org and the whole SW is more vocabulary than ontology
> and personally I think reasoning over distributed data with usable results
> is something we will not see soon but that does not mean that the SW cannot
> be a big thing right now. (010)
I agree with the top line. But if all I wanted to do was work with
vocabulary, I would choose the Google tools rather than the SW tools.
But I'm a cofounder of a company (VivoMind Research), which is doing
much more than working with vocabulary. Neither the Google tools nor
the SW tools are useful for what we're doing. (011)
Following is a paper I wrote last year, which starts with history
in Sections 1, 2, and 3. Section 4 has some comments about the SW,
Section 5 describes some of our work at VivoMind, and Section 6
summarizes some ideas about future directions: (012)
http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/futures.pdf
Future Directions for Semantic Systems (013)
Today, I would add more detail to Section 6. (014)
John (015)
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