Re: A bit of bomb throwing....

From: Stefano Mazzocchi <stefanom_at_mit.edu>
Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2006 16:57:35 -0500

Zack Rosen wrote:
>> 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.

Glad to hear that :-)

>> 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.

I started to use Java in 1995 where people knew for those little applets
that ran into Netscape Navigator 2.0, but I used it on the server side.

I started with Servlets 1.0, it didn't have sessions, the apache jserv
servlet engine was so poorly written that the logs where put into a
stack and then output, not a vector, a stack, so you couldn't understand
what was going on because

> 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?

How would I know? you tell me. This stuff works great for what I need
(better than anything else out there) and when it doesn't, we try to
find a way to fix it or improve it.

What I know is that coding builds software, complaining does not :-)

You have to choices: walk away or help us improve what you think it's wrong.

Personally, I think we need both people with real-world experience on
writing software and put it in production and thinkers with a lot of
whiteboards and hacked-up prototypes. SIMILE wants to be a place where
the two can meet, speak and confront.

Constructively.

You are welcome to join us.

Or you are welcome to consider us doomed.

Both are fine with me.

-- 
Stefano Mazzocchi
Research Scientist                 Digital Libraries Research Group
Massachusetts Institute of Technology            location: E25-131C
77 Massachusetts Ave                   telephone: +1 (617) 253-1096
Cambridge, MA  02139-4307              email: stefanom at mit . edu
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Received on Sat Jan 14 2006 - 21:57:20 EST

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