IRC log of swhack on 2001-07-31
Timestamps are in UTC.
- 00:06:53 [sbp]
- I wonder if these kind of enterprises that don't really have anything to do with the Semantic Web, but still bill themselves as such, will start to engulf the mainstream work?
- 00:07:02 [sbp]
- TimBL had the same fear with the WWW, of course
- 00:07:31 [sbp]
- But that was quite real. More people had heard of Mosaic than the WWW at one point...
- 00:08:02 [Aaron-SWWS]
- Hmm, after this it sure seems likely. :-(
- 00:08:23 [Aaron-SWWS]
- Even random guy in plane next to me pretended to know what semweb was
- 00:08:26 [sbp]
- I hope people realise that the implementation is not the system
- 00:08:39 [sbp]
- Really? What kind of stuff did he say?
- 00:08:57 [Aaron-SWWS]
- I didn't get a chance to follow up on it. :-(
- 00:09:28 [sbp]
- How did you know he was pretending, etc.?
- 00:09:48 [Aaron-SWWS]
- err, perhaps he wasn't pretending, but i doubt he really new what it was
- 00:10:08 [Aaron-SWWS]
- He wasn't that kind of guy, he makes memories.
- 00:10:20 [sbp]
- Yes. I'd not expect many people out of a very select circle to know much about it
- 00:12:11 [sbp]
- I think you've only got another 45 minutes to go
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- 01:25:17 [sbp]
- That little rant on #rdfig could start a good essay...
- 01:25:26 [sbp]
- It is both humbling and annoying to do a Google search for the "Semantic Web" (try it), and have to filter through the junk that it returns. The first few pages offer the W3C site, SWAG, the SciAm article and so forth, and then there are a couple more decent finds...
- 01:25:34 [sbp]
- and then it thins out considerably. It seems that few people really understand what the Semantic Web is all about.
- 01:25:45 [sbp]
- Evidence of this comes from the group of people (let's call them an rdfs:Class) that believe that XML has inherent semantics, and that by drafting information in XML, your information will be magically understood by Semantic Web agents. Have they read the DesignIssues literature? Have the played with RDF? Could they even tell you what a URI is, or discuss the concept of decentralization?
- 01:25:51 [sbp]
- Worse are the products that claim they are built for the "Semantic Web" and then offer oh so little. I've come across services that claim to be related to the Semantic Web, and yet use proprietary formats! There's getting on the bobsleigh, and then there's falling in front of it...
- 01:28:56 [sbp]
- So, what can we do about it? Unfortunately, very little at this stage. Telling people what the Semantic Web "is" is very difficult when there is no one true definition. The real SW developers are the community developers; not necessarily the academics, or the business people, or even the programmers. It's the people that have taken time to research, to learn what the Semantic Web has to offer. We all have a very long way to go, but it's fun to take stock of what w
- 01:32:49 [sbp]
- The concept of a global database takes some getting used to. It is bizarrely counter-intuitive, much like discovering that the earth goes round the sun (it does?). People aren't used to making data that has been encoded in proprietary formats for so long with "no ill effects" available on a globally decentralized basis. The fact there there is a clear lack of stable tools to process this data, and a lack of low-hanging-fruit type applications only confounds the si
- 01:36:26 [sbp]
- Aw, it looks like so much text when you write it in IRC :-)
- 01:37:25 [sbp]
- Hmm... according to Google, I'm mentioned on 1/18th of the World's literature about the Semantic Web
- 01:38:44 [sbp]
- Most of them appear to be emails
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