Kingsley Idehen wrote:
David Huynh wrote:
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
David,
When you see a URI (a URL is a URI to me) on the TV, or hear one
mentioned on the TV or Radio, you now have the option to interact with
a variety of representations associated with the aforementioned Thing
identified by the URI. You have representational choices that didn't
exist until now. Choice is inherently optional :-)
Beware the paradox of choices :-)
http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More-Less/dp/0060005696/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1242800143&sr=8-2
A URI by definition cannot presuppose representation. This is the
heart of the matter.
The Semantic Web Project isn't about a new Web distinct from the
ubiquitous World Wide Web. I think that sentiment and thinking faded a
long time ago.
If you are used to seeing a nice looking HTML based Web Page when you
place URIs in a browser or click on them, then there's nothing wrong
with that, always interact with a Web resource using the
representation that best suits the kind of interaction at hand. Thus,
someone else may want to know what data was contextualized by the nice
looking HTML representation (the data behind and around the page), and
on that basis seek a different representation via the same URI that
unveils the kind descriptive granularity delivered by an
Entity-Attribute-Value graph (e.g., RDF).
The revolution is about choice via negotiated representations in a
manner that's unobtrusive to the Web in its current form. Nobody has
to change how they use the Web, we are just adding options to an
evolving medium.
You've forced my hand, I need to make a movie once and for all :-)
It's not forcing, just nudging :) It'll be a win for all.
David
