Clay Shirky's recent rant against the Semantic Web has triggered a raft of responses. Paul Ford's make some particularly good points.
One of the real sticking points with this is that in order to address the two important questions about any effort like the SemWeb (namely
- Is it useful?
- Is it possible?
), we need first to answer the more fundamental question
- What is it?
, and we don't seem to have a good, shared, answer to that. The W3C provide a definition which doesn't help a great deal. Paul proposes an alternative, simpler definition:
The Semantic Web is a framework that rigidly defines a means for creating statements of the form “Subject, Predicate, Object” or “triples,” in a machine-readable format, where each of Subject, Predicate, Object is a URI. [Paul Ford: A Response to Clay Shirky's “The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview”]
In actual fact, neither of the definitions really help much in the raging debate, since they essentially avoid controversy by only describing the technology (Pauls definition also presents one view, that of triples, rather than another common "model" of RDF data as a digraph).
But that's fine, because the technology provides a number of things which are not available in any widely recognised, remotely standardised, or (freely available) tool supported form. So the grand visions aren't essential.
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