From: pat hayes (phayes@ai.uwf.edu)
Date: 04/25/01
>All- sorry I wasn't able to join today - had planned to come in by >cell, but discovered that my coverage in Utah was too spotty. Next time, use a supermarket pay phone. Can't beat copper for conduction. >Next time for sure. We arent meeting next WEEK, be warned, since most folk will be in Hongkong > Meanwhile, W3C Semweb-coordination Group has been discussing Web >Ontology charter and how to move ahead. Issue of where to draw line >between RDFCore and WebOnt is being discussed - I'd welcome your >comments (why not send to me, instead of whole list, and I'll >summarize and redistribute) As all this discussion has been going on behind closed doors, how can we possibly comment on it? W3C is a very opaque organization seen from the outside, Jim. God knows what it is up to. Google can't find anything using "W3C Web Ontology" . One quick comment; the idea of basing the entire semantic web offort on RDF in the latter's current primitive state seems to me to be highly risky, to put it mildly, and moreover it seems just plain dumb. Why would something as grandiose as the Sem Web idea want to committ itself to something as small and parochial as RDF? Is this an aspect of Tim B-L's methodological stance, a lesson he learned from the success of HTML, a kind of 'keep it small' philosophy? If so, it misses a crucial difference: HTML was being used by people to communicate with each other. SWML (whatever it turns out to be) has to be used by machines to understand each other. The requirements are deeply and fundamentally different. The ways machine/machine communication goes wrong, can be repaired, and can succeed, differ profoundly from the ways that human/human communication does and can. It might be salutary and useful if the RDFCore were to spend some time listening to what the ontologists want, instead of telling them what they can have. Pat --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola, FL 32501 (850)202 4440 fax phayes@ai.uwf.edu http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes
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