Since Mr. Wakelam seems to have taken umbrage at my previous answer to his question, I did about 5 minutes of research and offer the following. I hope this is more what he was looking for. Wakelam Paul (RBAU/LOG) asked: >has anyone got any opinion on Semantic web? http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ Personally, I think that the W3C may have gotten a bit out of control. Some of the stuff that they are doing with XML, as well as some of the vision they have for the web (like this semantic web) seem to me to have interest to computer scientists and tecno-geeks but little or no immediate practical application. >Is it complementary to XML ? It uses XML and a number of related technologies. >What are the disadvantages and advantages compared to Ken Steel's BSI ? That's about like asking about the advantages and disadvantages of apples compared to oranges - they are two completely different things. >From the summary activity statements and Scientific American article, the Semantic Web is an architecture for the web that will allow semantics (meanings of data) to be expressed much better than is currently possible on the web. It is based on several technologies including XML and RDF (metadata). The goal is to enable the web to support not only human activities but processing by applications such as intelligent agents. It also is designed to support "multiple ontologies", meaning several schemes for defining meaning (read XML tags). The Scientific American article is a good intro: http://www.scientificamerican.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html BSI, on the other hand, is strictly designed to enable interoperation of business applications (like traditional EDI). It doesn't have anything to do with the web. Although it supports the use of several different ontologies (ISO BSR, Australian BSR, etc.) in any specific trading relationship it only supports one ontology. (I'm sure Ken will correct me if I'm wrong on any of the details. Ken, I'm surprised you haven't commented on this one!). Cheers, -- Michael C. Rawlins, Rawlins EC Consulting www.rawlinsecconsulting.com ======================================================================= To contact the list owner: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives at http://www.mail-archive.com/edi-l%40listserv.ucop.edu/
