Sherman Monroe wrote:
To be more specific, these days a news reporter can say
"foobar.com <http://foobar.com>" on TV and expect that to mean
something to most of the audience. That's a marvel. Something more
than just the string "foobar.com <http://foobar.com>" is
transfered. It's the expectation that if anyone in the audience
were to type "foobar.com <http://foobar.com>" into any web
browser, then they would be seeing information served by the
authority associated with some topic or entity called "foobar" as
socially defined. And 99% of the audience would be seeing the same
information. What's the equivalent or analogous of that on the SW?
I just want to make sure the analogies are aligned properly and are
salient. The WWW contains only nouns (no sentences). If I have an
interest or service I want to share with others, then I post a webpage
and /share its URL/ with you. In the SW, things are centered around
the crowd, if I have something to say about the an interest, service,
place, person, etc, then I /reference its URL/ in my statements. So
the SW contains sentences that can be browsed. Type the URL in the WWW
browser, you get /the thing /being shared. Type the URI in the SW
browser, you get the /things people say about the thing/.
I didn't quite express myself clearly. If you were to take the previous
sentence ("I didn't quite express myself clearly"), and encode it in
RDF, what would you get? It certainly is something that I said about
"the thing", the thing being vaguely what I tried to explain before (how
do you mint a URI for that?). The point is that using RDF or whatever
other non-natural language structured data representation, you cannot
practically represent "the things people say about the thing" in the
majority of real-life cases. You can only express a very tiny subset of
what can be said in natural language. This affects how people
conceptualize and use this medium. If I hear a URI on TV, would I be
motivated enough to type it into some browser when what I get back looks
like an engineering spec sheet, but worse--with different rows from
different sources, forcing me to derive the big picture myself,
urn:sdajfdadjfai324829083742983:sherman_monroe
name: Sherman Monroe (according to foo.com)
age: __ (according to bar.com)
age: ___ (according to bar2.com)
nationality: __ (according to baz.com)
...
rather than, say, a natural language essay that conveys a coherent
opinion, or a funny video?
David
