Ed, (01)
I agree with your comments. I just have a few qualifications. (02)
> In defense of Sir Tim and gang, W3C is a reputable standards body. (03)
I agree. (04)
They did a good job for the many standards required for the WWW. (05)
> But for most industries in the U.S., standards are "voluntary".
> They are agreements on how to do things that improve your ability
> to acquire suppliers and create market, and you can use them where
> you see value, and ignore them where you see other opportunities. (06)
I agree. Unfortunately, that leads to many good standards that are
not fully and consistently implemented. JavaScript, for example,
wasn't fully supported until ECMA defined ECMAScript. The Europeans
forced the major browsers to implement the standard. (07)
Re Sir Tim: I would actually be much happier if the W3C had given
him more support. As I said in a previous note, I believe that
Tim B-L's vision in 2000 was far better than what was implemented: (08)
http://www.w3.org/2000/01/sw/DevelopmentProposal (09)
This proposal is not very detailed, and a lot of work would be
required to flesh it out. But the goals in 2000 were realistic.
There are working systems today that do the kinds of things in
this proposal. But none of them are part of the Semantic Web. (010)
I blame the "Decidability Thought Police" (i.e., the DL theoreticians)
for derailing many valuable aspects of this proposal. I believe that
the "engineers" -- people who implement AI systems that other people
actually use -- were more knowledgeable about the requirements and
the methods for implementing them than the theoreticians who insisted
on restricting the expressive power of OWL. (011)
John (012)
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