Comment Re:RDF Ability vs. RDF Techincal Complexity (Score 1) 144
Yes, making RDF popular and widespread is really what Tim had in mind when he promotes the semantic web. Its not about users; its about machines understanding (in the AI sense) each other's content. Sorry to hear that in reality RDF isn't there yet. Tim's vision is that someday soon database users would push the RDF button on their web database, and it would make available their data for other machines (not necessarily people) to use. Specifically he made the point that the semantic web is not about manually adding meaning-tags to html. Its about automation.
Also interesting was the next question at the session, (I was there) by Andrew McCallum, who commented about the semantic web's inability to express a fact's degree of certainty. Andrew is from the probabilistic AI tribe, and rightly characterized the work done to date on the semantic web as coming from old-school AI. This limitation will probably do more to hamper its development in the long run than the ones idenfitified by Novig.
Also interesting was the next question at the session, (I was there) by Andrew McCallum, who commented about the semantic web's inability to express a fact's degree of certainty. Andrew is from the probabilistic AI tribe, and rightly characterized the work done to date on the semantic web as coming from old-school AI. This limitation will probably do more to hamper its development in the long run than the ones idenfitified by Novig.
