hmm, interesting questions - tell you what - if someone will tell me
what the answers are for the Web, then I can think about how we might
make similar answers for the Semantic Web -- seriously, the goal is a
cross-cutting technology, not a single solution engine. That said, I
do agree that some compelling success stories (esp in Life Science)
would be good. One thing I'd love to see would be some
interoperability between the products of various publishers by
linking their thesauri/vocabulary/ontologies. We had a small demo of
this playing with linking some Nature cancer work to some EPA cancer
work via the NCI cancer ontology, but it was just a very small set as
we had no funding to push this - might be an interesting thing to
look at something larger scale than this as a use case...
-JH
At 7:17 -0400 4/4/06, Kashyap, Vipul wrote:
To be honest, I think that this is a recipe of despair; I don't think
that there is any one thing that SW enables you do to that could not
do in another way. It's a question of whether you can do things more
conveniently, or with more commonality than other wise; after all, XML
is just an extensible syntax and, indeed, could do exactly nothing
that SGML could not do (when it came out -- XML standards exceed SGML
ones now). XML has still been successful.
[VK] I think Anita and you are not actually in disagreement. The SW community
together needs to concretely define and measure:
- "how much more conveniently (at a lower cost?) can things be done in
comparison to other technologies"
- "how much commonality can be invoked using SW technologies"
IMHO, if the answer to the above questions is not yes, then we are
just doing SW
for intellectual entertainment.
It's more a question of whether, RDF or OWL provides a combination of
things that we would not get otherwise. With OWL (DL and lite), I
rather like the ability to check my model with a reasoner, and to be
able to apply the ontology automatically in some circumstances. With
RDF, you have a convenient technology for building a hyperlinked
resource, but with added link types.
[VK] But how useful are thee artifacts? Do they result in improving the
performance/quality of certain things or do they help doing things more
conveniently?
Of course, you could do the latter with straight XML (well, since RDF
is XML, you are doing so). And the former could be done without OWL,
just with a raw DL; of course, then you wouldn't get some of the
additional features of OWL (such as multi-lingual support which
derives directly from the XML).
[VK] Are these features really important and useful? Does
multi-lingual support
help alleviate or solve existing problems? Are there any studies which
conclusively demonstrate this?
Having said all that went before, I agree with this; having a set of
RDF/OWL life sciences success stories which explained why the
technology was appropriate (if not uniquely appropriate) would be a
good thing, if it has not been done before.
[VK] Exactly! See! I said we are actually in agreement!
---Vipul
--
Professor James Hendler Director
Joint Institute for Knowledge Discovery 301-405-2696
UMIACS, Univ of Maryland 301-314-9734 (Fax)
College Park, MD 20742 http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler
Web Log: http://www.mindswap.org/blog/author/hendler
