From: Lemmer John F Civ AFRL/IFTB (John.Lemmer@rl.af.mil)
Date: 04/04/02
As a potenial DAML +OIL user, but one who will probably not go that route,
here is my 2 cents worth. Every new thing like DAML exits somewhere in a
tradeoff between academic elegance and practical utility. From what I see
of DAML, it is way to far from utility and way to close to (attempted)
elegance.
It seems DAML is re-fighting (and still not winning) the wars the KR
community has been struggling with for at least the last 20 years.
john
-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Hendler [mailto:hendler@cs.umd.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, April 03, 2002 11:57 PM
To: joe rockmore; daml-all@daml.org
Subject: Re: ASSERTION, QUESTION, SUGGESTION
At 2:50 PM -0800 4/3/02, joe rockmore wrote:
david brings up an excellent point, one that i have been asking (mainly to
mike dean) since the program start. however, i think his problem statement
is not quite right, and his potential solution is not what i would
recommend. i wouldn't state the problem as, "why should i use DAML + OIL,"
but rather, "what does DAML + OIL provide to me over XML + XML schema + RDF
+ RDF schema," i.e., over the web languages already being developed and
used. and the solution of a white paper, while valuable, in my opinion must
be combined with a short and to-the-point (e.g., one sentence) answer to the
question.
when i have asked various people variations on this question, i have gotten
long answers, good examples, language constructs in DAML + OIL that are not
in XML + ..., etc. but what i have not gotten, and i could seriously use in
my current dealings, is a straightforward and short explanation of the value
added. the scientific american article, and many other documents, give
great explanations of what good the semantic web is, which the naive person
(who, for instance, only knows XML or HTML) buys, but the sophisticated
person who knows RDF and all the W3C work is harder to convince without this
clear value-added statement (especially if he is cynical or doesn't want to
be convinced, like the people i am dealing with now). he can be convinced
with much more info, such as in the white paper david suggests, but i still
think a one-liner would be valuable to get him to read the details.
just my 2 cents.
...joe
the minute someone sends me a (correct) 1 sentence answer to any of the
following questions, I'll be happy to try to cons up an answer to the one
above:
1) WHat is the advantage of HTML when SGML exists?
2) What is the advantage of XML when SGML exists?
3) What is the advantage of XML over HTML?
4) What is the advantage of using RDF?
5) What is the advantage of using XML?
(ad infinitum)
-Jim H.
--
Professor James Hendler hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies 301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab. 301-405-6707 (Fax)
AV Williams Building, Univ of Maryland College Park, MD 20742
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler
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