RE: ASSERTION, QUESTION, SUGGESTION

From: Jim Hendler (hendler@cs.umd.edu)
Date: 04/04/02


>... and reinforces the assertion which began
>this exchange: Some folks, who go to www.daml.org to be convinced they
>should start using DAML+OIL, are not finding the right kind of material to
>convince them.

that, btw, I believe is true!  Back when I was involved in your 
project I strongly urged the community to help make that web site 
better.

I point out the following - we took over a year to get 1M hits on the 
page, about 6 months to get the second 1M hits, and recently (<3 
months) we broke the 3rd million - the site is now getting an average 
somewhere around 10,000 hits per day (that's enough to sell 
advertising :->)  and the continued interest of DARPA and the outside 
world in what the PIs in this program are doign is reflected in that. 
But, David is absolutely right - a lot of those people aren't finding 
what they want, and a lot of stuff on the site is starting to go 
downhill (the library search doesn't work, and the new entries to the 
library have fallen off) -- I suspect this is allowing the locus of 
interest to move to other sites and that is probably a bad thing for 
the future of your program.

anyway, hope you don't mind this kibbitzing from a former member of 
the community, and I sure wish you'd all work a little harder to make 
a lot of people's first portal to the semantic web a more useful 
experience...
  -JH

-- 
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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