On Sun, Nov 3, 2013 at 3:45 PM, Eric Lease Morgan <emor...@nd.edu> wrote: > This is hard. The Semantic Web (and RDF) attempt at codifying knowledge using > a strict syntax, specifically a strict syntax of triples. It is very > difficult for humans to articulate knowledge, let alone codifying it. How > realistic is the idea of the Semantic Web? I wonder this not because I don’t > think the technology can handle the problem. I say this because I think > people can’t (or have great difficulty) succinctly articulating knowledge. Or > maybe knowledge does not fit into triples?
I think you're right Eric. I don't think knowledge can be encoded completely in triples, any more than it can be encoded completely in finding aids or books. One thing that I (naively) wasn't fully aware of when I started dabbling the Semantic Web and Linked Data is how much the technology is entangled with debates about the philosophy of language. These debates play out in a variety of ways, but most notably in disagreements about the nature of a resource (httpRange-14) in Web Architecture. Shameless plug: Dorothea Salo and I tried to write about how some of this impacts the domain of the library/archive [1]. One of the strengths of RDF is its notion of a data model that is behind the various serializations (xml, ntriples, json, n3, turtle, etc). I'm with Ross though: I find it much to read rdf as turtle or json-ld than it is rdf/xml. //Ed [1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.4591
