The 7 (f)laws of the Semantic Web

[BigBison]

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2006/06/the_7_flaws_of_the_semantic_we.html?CMP=OTC-TY3388567169&ATT=The+7+f+laws+of+the+Semantic+Web

[the_pm]

It seems to me Zambonini is talking more about the barriers that make it hard for people to access and understand the technology (or their desire to do so), rather than flaws within the system itself, though he does point out pretty directly how flaws in human judgment flaw the system as a whole.

I find it interesting that he talks about a universal ontology, since I just recently blew up the SUMO ontology (http://www.ontologyportal.org/) to turn it into a wall poster :D

[BigBison]

The debate on how to build the semantic web is centered around the "closed-world vs. open-world" debate. RDF and SUMO are "open-world" technologies, XHTML is a "closed-world" technology. The difference is, with a closed-world approach validation is possible.

We can validate our XHTML documents against an open standard, sure, but they're still closed-world because anything out of place is assumed to be invalid. With RDF, anything out of place is only considered possibly invalid.

In other words, SUMO's nice, but how do we validate documents against it? The worry (expressed by the advocates of a closed-world approach) is that by eliminating validation we remove the ability to test web pages against a verifiable standard and we're right back to the muck that web standards have only recently rescued the web from, which is that every vendor has their own take on how things should work.

I'm no expert, that's just the opinion I've formed from reading several articles on this issue, that going with the open-world model (espoused primarily by Sir Tim Berners-Lee) may come at the cost of interoperability.

[the_pm]

I'd go a step further and posit that an open-world ideology is the ultimate justification for proprietary/closed systems. Since there's no industry ISO to follow, you create your own that will probably not be compatible with others, therefore defaulting into a closed framework.

Ever notice how the countries with almost no government/legal framework are the ones in which people are most oppressed? It's sort of like that, but...erm...more geeky :lol:

[BigBison]

Careful, a "closed-world" approach vs. an "open-world" approach is a completely different argument from open-source vs. proprietary. The semantic web can be built on open standards like SUMO no problem, it's just that the software makers would be free to interpret this as they see fit, open source or not.

In a closed world, a tag is either part of a DOCTYPE or it isn't, but the nature of RDF makes this sort of check impossible. If I find an article that explains this better I'll post it. Since it's a "closed world", everyone agrees on what's valid and what isn't, even those making proprietary software.

[the_pm]

I understand they are different. I'm wondering if one begets the other. If you can't validate the components within your system against an industry-accepted ISO, then you've been given all the justification you need to use components and/or create a system without regard to others.

[BigBison]

Yes, but the proponents of RDF don't see it that way, they're still talking about open standards that everyone follows. The problem is, what happens when one person categorizes a coral as a plant, and another person categorizes it as an animal?

SUMO likely lists "coral" as a "type of plant" and also as a "type of animal" so which one is more valid than the other? I see what you're saying, but I don't see why this would lead anyone to develop their own proprietary standard which insists that "coral" may be a "type of animal" but not a "type of plant".

What's more likely to happen is that a software system only accepts "coral" as "type of plant" when another software system only accepts "coral" as "type of animal". The two systems are using the same open standards, yet they can't interoperate because they disagree on validity.

[BigBison]

Of course, "coral" could also be categorized as a "type of plant" and a "type of animal" instead of either-or. So that's the problem, how do we account for interoperability between three systems with three different, yet equally valid, interpretations of what a "coral" is?

[BigBison]

"Closed World vs. Open World: The First Semantic Web Battle"

http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/91/

Refers to this PDF:

http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~horrocks/Publications/download/2005/HPPH05.pdf

[BigBison]

More Semantic Web food-for-thought:

Why the World is ready for the Semantic Web
Wednesday June 28, 2006 1:41AM
by Dan Zambonini in Opinion

Some people argue that although the Semantic Web technologies are all in place, the world isn’t ready for the Semantic Web vision yet; that we’re still a couple of years away from fully embracing and adopting Semantic Web principles and attitudes.

Perhaps, though, the opposite is closer to the truth: that some of the biggest and best projects on the web today are based on Semantic Web principles - they just don’t happen to be using Semantic Web technologies.

It could be argued that Semantic Web models are exploding on to the web in spite of the technology, not because of it. Maybe we are using older, more limited technologies because of our lack of understanding and desire to learn complex new languages.

...

So there we have it - a limited “Semantic Web” appearing without the complex technologies that have been developed for it.

Will the trend continue? Can it, using existing technologies, or will developers eventually ‘find’ RDF, OWL and SPARQL? Should the appearance and popularity of these applications give Semantic Web proponents hope that the real thing is coming, or do they give Semantic Web opponents valid ammunition against unnecessary complexities?

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2006/06/why_the_world_is_ready_for_the.html

RDF and OWL I have some concept of but I don't even know what SPARQL is.

[the_pm]

Is it a query language?

[BigBison]

Hmmm... perhaps even a remote query language of some kind. Not that I've rushed right out and looked it up, but I think it's a protocol, i.e. "sparql://example.com/" instead of HTTP for searches.

[the_pm]

http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/

I'll be damned if I can't figure out what the SPA part stands for, but RQL appears to be RDF Query Language.

This is still a release candidate.

[BigBison]

Huh. I wonder if there's a tool for it, or if I need to write my own SPARQL app to use it. For now I think I'll stick to figuring out XQUERY, seems more relevant to my here-today needs.

No clue what SPARQL means here, either. I learned the other day that YAML doesn't mean, as I had assumed, "Yet Another Markup Language" but rather, "YAML's Not A Markup Language". :smash: So wtf not call it "NAML" I said to myself in disgust. Or even CAML, for "CAML's Not a Markup Language" by their logic, would be somewhat less confusing.

[BigBison]

I find it interesting that he talks about a universal ontology, since I just recently blew up the SUMO ontology (http://www.ontologyportal.org/) to turn it into a wall poster :D

Yeah, if you like SUMO you'll love O3:

Ontology of Ontology (O3) is created to classify ontologies according to the conceptualization that an ontology offers. Here, we take an ontology's symbol/model dichotomy to account for its extension/intensional conceptualization because it allows us to objectively classify ontology and perform normalization for the sake of ontology sharing and reuse.

http://www.charlestoncore.org/ont/2005/08/o3.html#Ontology+Normalization

Got that? Time to break out my "Martin Eden" analogy again. :D

[BigBison]

There's also the Laboratory of Applied Ontology:

http://www.loa-cnr.it/DOLCE.html

[the_pm]

There's also the Laboratory of Applied Ontology:

http://www.loa-cnr.it/DOLCE.htmlHoly Bison poop, Batman! The DOLCE documentation is 350 pages long!

Nice light reading. I'll get to it around the time I retire :lol:

[BigBison]

I wonder if they'll print it out on a roll of toilet paper for me?

[BigBison]

What is RDF?

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/01/24/rdf.html?CMP=OTC-TY3388567169&ATT=What+Is+RDF

[BigBison]

Huh:

http://internet-apps.blogspot.com/2006/07/xhtml-2-and-semantic-web-are-we-nearly.html

[BigBison]

The W3C XHTML working group has published the eighth public working draft of XHTML 2.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-xhtml2-20060726). XHTML 2.0 is the next, backwards incompatible version of HTML that incorporates XFrames, XForms, and lots of other crunchy XML goodness. This draft adds support for xml:id, but still retains the old non-namespaced id attribute. XLink is not yet included and may never be. (The HTML Working Group are extreme XLink skeptics.) Whether browser vendors will ever agree to implement this is an open question.

http://www.cafeconleche.org/#July_29_2006_39584

[BigBison]

Queso - a Semantic Web/Web 2.0 server

A group of us at IBM have been hacking for the past month on a server implementation that combines the current thoughts behind both Semantic Web and Web 2.0. My group is involved with different WGs/XGs at the W3C, open source projects, IBM internal projects, etc so we felt that a good testbed for our research and play would be a server that supports the best of both worlds. We named the prototype: Queso, spanish for cheese, because we are currently naming everything after the Mexican burrito place across the street in Cambridge, MA. Queso is a J2EE-style application that implements the Atom Protocol specification currently in draft-09 atop an RDF server called Boca (the restaurant’s name is Boca Grande, a.k.a. Big Mouth) using Henry Story’s Atom OWL for the model and of course opening up a SPARQL endpoint to query the contents the store.

http://torrez.us/archives/2006/07/17/471/

Remember when Jamie was asking about server naming schemes? There's a tip from the pros at IBM. ;)

[BigBison]

Follow-up post on the Queso note:

http://torrez.us/archives/2006/07/21/473/

[BigBison]

RQL appears to be RDF Query Language.

The reason an RDF Query Language is so buzzworthy these days is because someone has finally figured out that RDF and XHTML don't mix. Which is what "RDFa" is all about, and why it's so buzzworthy:

RDFa is a syntax that accomplishes this metadata expression using a set of elements and attributes that embed RDF in XHTML. An important goal of RDFa is to achieve this RDF embedding without repeating existing XHTML content when that content is the metadata. Though RDFa was initially designed for XHTML2, one should be able to use RDFa with other XML dialects, e.g. XHTML1, SVG, given proper schema additions.

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/

That's a very important consideration when dealing with HTML, certain tags like <dt> and <th> imply metadata, not content.

[BigBison]

Master Foo's Taxation Theory of Microformats:

http://open.itworld.com/4934/nls_ebiz_mastfoo060502/pfindex.html