From: Lemmer John F Civ AFRL/IFTB ([email protected])
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:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, April 03, 2002 11:57 PM To: joe rockmore; [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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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