On 01.07.2010 22:44:48, Pat Hayes wrote: >Jeremy, your argument is perfectly sound from your company's POV, but >not from a broader perspective. Of course, any change will incur costs
Well, I think the "broader perspective" that the RDF workshop failed to consider is exactly companies' costs and spec marketability. The message still sent out is a crazy (or "visionary" ;) research community creating spec after spec, with no stability in sight. And with the W3C process not really encouraging the quick or full refactoring of existing specs (like getting rid of once recommended features), each spec adds *new* features and increases the overall complexity of identifying market-ready Recs: RIF seems to be a replacement for OWL, but OWL2 was only just Rec'd. Which should I implement? RDFa 1.1 and SPARQL 1.1 both look like implementation nightmares to me. Current RDF stores can't even be used for semantic feed readers because of poor "ORDER BY DESC(?date)" implementations, but the group is already working on query federation. RDFa is becoming the new RSS 1.0, with each publisher triggering the development of dedicated parsers (one for SearchMonkey data, one for RichSnippets, one for Facebook's OGP, etc., but a single interoperable one? Very hard work.) Something is wrong here. Featuritis is the reason for the tiny number of complete toolkits. It's extremely frustrating when you know in advance that you won't be able to pass the tests *and* have your own (e.g. performance) needs covered. Why start at all then? The W3C groups still seem to believe that syntactic sugar is harmless. We suffer from spec obesity, badly. If we really want to improve RDF, then we should go, well, for a low-carb layer cake. Or better, several new ones. One for each target audience. KR pros probably need OWL 2.0 *and* RIF, others may already be amazed by "scoped key-value storage with a universal API" (aka triples + SPARQL). These groups are equally important, but have to be addressed differently. Our problem is not lack of features (native literal subjects? c'mon!). It is identifying the individual user stories in our broad community and marketing respective solution bundles. The RDFa and LOD folks have demonstrated that this is possible. Similar success stories are probably RIF for the business rules market, OWL for the DL/KR sector, and many more. (Mine is agile, flexi-schema website development.) RDF "Next Steps" should be all about scoped learning material and deployment. There were several workshop submissions (e.g. by Jeremy, Lee, and Richard) that mentioned this issue, but the workshop outcome seems to be purely technical. Too bad. Benji -- Benjamin Nowack http://bnode.org/ http://semsol.com/
