Re: A bit of bomb throwing....

From: Zack Rosen <zack_at_civicspacelabs.org>
Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2006 22:19:15 -0800

> I learned the hard way that debating about technologies, operating
> systems, text editors, programming languages, XML schemas and RDF
> ontologies doesn't pay off. Why? because it's deeply subjective
> and, mostly, irrational.

I too agree that debating about names and technology flavors is quite
pointless :) this was definitely not my intention.

> If what the semantic web researching community creates doesn't work
> for you, well, just use something else :-)
>
> For me, personally, the semantic web is just a catchy but a little
> bit tacky name.
>
> What *I* like about it is that I finally have a way to encode
> graphs that doesn't suck and therefore a general purpose data
> description language that is not just a syntax (as XML) but also a
> model.
>
> And it's easily mixable.
>
> Ergo, I can take your data and mix it with mine and mix it with
> some other, stir it with some general purpose tool (browser,
> visualizer, clusterer, inferencer, ruler, whatever...) and find out
> something that wasn't easy to see there before.
>
> World-Wide Web of Data, Global Data Warehousing... call it as you
> wish, but there is nothing really semantic about what we are doing
> here, it's just a catchy term (and source of a lot of problems, IMO).
>
> If you care about that problem space, jump on board, it will be fun.
>
> If not, you won't find anything exiting around here, and that's
> totally fine too :-)

I care deeply about the problem space. The issue is that it is
simply too costly to 'jump on board' at the moment and I don't see
that changing any time soon. Consider me an overly eager early
adopter. I represent a number of organizations with reasonable
development budgets that would be incredibly well served by semantic
technologies but the tools are simply out of reach. Why is this?

-Zack
Received on Sat Jan 14 2006 - 06:19:00 EST