Dare Obasanjo wrote:
>  
> ...
>  
>  PS: It saddens me that intelligent people are wasting cycles
>  pontificating on the pie in the sky that is the semantic
>  too-fantastic-to-ever-be-real web instead of applying themselves to
>  solve problems that exist today in ways that benefit the average user
>  and the average developer.

I don't know who this was directed at, because I am not a semantic web
guru, but rather just a lowly XML developer. Nevertheless, here's what I
know about the SemWeb:

 * intelligent people believe it can work

 * many people tell me that they are *already* using RDF and topic maps
to solve real business problems

 * if you strip away all of the pie in the sky stuff, RDF is a
serialization format for strongly typed information graphs -- that seems
useful to me.

 * the Web was pie-in-the-sky and too-fantastic-to-ever-be-real in its
day

Given these facts, I have recently tended to give the SemWeb the benefit
of the doubt. It is probably in the same state SGML was before XML. It
needs a simplification and some killer apps. Nevertheless, one does not
need it to justify a URI-centric view of the Internet information space.

On the other hand, I also gave SOAP the benefit of the doubt for many
months until I dug into the specification and was presented with an
alternative. ;)

 Paul Prescod

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