Mike, (01)
There are effects whose impact is obvious, and there others that are
like flapping butterfly wings. Perhaps they might create a tornado
halfway around the world at some undefined point in the future. (02)
JFS
>> Does anyone know whether [summit 2011] had any useful effects? (03)
MB
> Of course there is no sure way of quantifying influence. On the
> other hand, it's all those unmeasurable, small influences that
> contribute to the broader ongoing conversations. (04)
I don't disagree, but I'd like to see more than just conversations.
I've been attending conferences about ontologies and participating
on email lists for over 20 years. I want results, not conversations. (05)
Compare two projects started by Tim BL: a proposal for the WWW
in 1989, and a proposal for the Semantic Web in 1994. (06)
1, With a small group, he got the first version of the WWW
up and running at the end of 1990, it was made available
to the world in 1991, and it was creating major new
companies within a few years, some of which have become
multibillion dollar corporations. (07)
2. The SW was proposed to a large and enthusiastic audience
at the first W3C meeting in 1994. Many volunteers jumped
on the bandwagon at the beginning, and millions of euros
of research funding poured in. (08)
After 18 years, the SW has produced a lot of documents, but very
little business. There are universities and small companies
with their hands out for research grants, doing consulting, etc.
But there is nothing like the chain reaction created by the WWW. (09)
People point to a lot of RDF files on the WWW as evidence that
somebody is doing something. But I would point to the number
of PHP applications. PHP started in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf,
who wrote some Perl scripts for his Personal Home Page.
He posted them on the WWW for anybody who might want them,
and PHP took off with no hype or funding from anybody. (010)
Some lessons to be learned: (011)
1. The WWW and PHP were simple, well defined ideas that were
implemented quickly to solve a specific problem, which
turned out to have many more applications than the original
designers had expected. (012)
2. The SW was a solution in search of a problem. Neither Tim
nor anybody else had a clear idea about how it would be
implemented or what it would do. (013)
3. Large numbers of people with conflicting ideas started to
propose and implement solutions to unclear or unspecified
problems. Then the W3C codified them in RFCs that could
not be changed "because too many people depended on them." (014)
4. Meanwhile gov't and business groups dumped research money
on universities and small companies to implement the RFCs,
whose purpose or value was untested and unknown. (015)
You can make up a similar list of issues with much of the
work that has been done under the name of 'ontology' --
in fact, there is a large overlap between SW projects
and ontology projects. (016)
John (017)
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