Today we have the web. Discounting Web Services and the Semantic Web, what
happens next?

What is the third way, Simon?


---
Danny Ayers
<stuff>  http://www.isacat.net </stuff>


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@[...].com]
> Sent: 24 April 2002 23:25
> To: Mike Champion
> Cc: xml-dev
> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] SemWeb again
> 
> 
> On Wed, 2002-04-24 at 17:01, Mike Champion wrote:
> > 4/24/2002 12:33:29 PM, Paul Prescod <paul@[...].net> wrote:
> > >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.
> >
> > Perhaps, but it has generated an awful lot of ill feeling for
> the W3C leadership, in my
> > humble and personal opinion garnered from many private
> conversations.  Whatever the
> > justification for that ill feeling, it is critical for SemWeb
> advocates to understand and
> > come to grips with it.
> >
> > I see three general threads in the critique of the semantic web
> initiative:
> 
> While I think your critique of the Semantic Web is quite reasonable, and
> I consider myself generally hostile to both Web Services (WS) and the
> Semantic Web, I think you've missed something important as you picked up
> Dare's red herring.
> 
> In the past, I'd hoped that the SW and WS would just plain counteract
> each and keep each other at bay.  I don't see that happening now that
> each has its own activity.  That said, it's worth contrasting the two
> activities in terms of their relevance to and impact on the Web.
> 
> The Semantic Web, for all its folly, isn't really a threat to Web
> architecture per se.  While I think TimBL's insistence that we let him
> return RDF in dereferencing namespace URIs is hideous and ugly, it's
> hideous and ugly for reasons that have more to do with XML than anything
> Web-like that came before.  The Semantic Web is basically about creating
> frameworks that rest on top of the Web-as-we-know-it and reusing them.
> 
> Whether those frameworks make sense or not is a different matter.
> 
> Web Services is a very different matter architecturally.  It makes an
> even greater mess of our limited understandings of URIs by putting
> multiple potentially unknown possibilities behind a single URI,
> conflates headers and messages constantly, and its creators appear to
> have zero patience for any notion of the Web that might in fact
> constrain whatever they feel like doing.
> 
> While the Semantic Web may be a waste of time, it's no threat to the
> Web, and may in fact end up enhancing the more conventional Web.  While
> Web Services may feel like today's hot and exciting thing, it feels to
> me like pollution of the Web at a very fundamental level.
> 
> Agent Orange did a very nice job defoliating trees - hey, it worked!  It
> also had some nasty side effects.
> 
> --
> Simon St.Laurent
> Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
> Errors, errors, all fall down!
> http://simonstl.com
> 
> 
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