Re: SEMIS Bulletin
Danny,
Your one-line summary reminds me of two of
my other complaints about the semantic web:
DA> To put it another way, the WWW is the
> Semantic Web 80% done.
My first objection is to the idea that the WWW
makes a significant step toward the semantic web.
The semantic part is vastly more difficult than
designing a protocol for hooking together the
Internet with a subset of SGML. I would put the
WWW contribution closer to 8% or perhaps 0.8%.
I regard XML as a great notation for marking up
documents. But it's more of a nuisance than a help
for doing semantics. Instead of the 30-year-old
GML base, I would prefer the 40-year-old LISP base
as the foundation for a one-size-fits-all parser.
And in any case, notation is the least of our
problems when we're trying to do semantics.
(I say this as someone who has been doing a lot
of work on notation, but I am the first to say
that what is expressed is far more important
than the notation for expressing it.)
My second objection is that the word "web" in the
phrase "semantic web" is the tail wagging the dog.
I certainly agree that the network is just as
fundamental to computing as the database, file
system, utilities, applications, etc., etc., etc.
And for that reason, it should not be distinguished
as something separate.
The title of the bulletin that started this thread
is "Semantic Web and Information Systems" (SEMIS).
I suggest that we delete the three middle words and
address the problem of designing semantic systems.
John