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RDF and OWL - The New SGML ?

renato@iannella.it — 2010-11-12T22:12:46+10:00

In my first Blog, I basically said that the Semantic Web is too complicated for the Web user.

A recent blog from Sandro Hawke (W3C) calling for a “Simplified RDF”, and a presentation (pdf) at the W3C Technical Plenary by Jeni Tennison talks of a “stack of complex technologies”. These have prompted me to write a followup.

RDF and OWL are two “competing” - and in the case of OWL - very complex languages. If I was a “working ontologist”, I would probably be very happy...but I am not, and so are 99.999% of the rest of the web users.

I can still remember a meeting we had with the W3C team - on a cold Winter December 1997 in Boston - to convince them of the need for a “Metadata” activity to tackle the issue of representing metadata on the web. At the time, the Dublin Core group was pushing this as there was no definitive road forward for web metadata. Even today, 13 years later, the DC group still seems to have lots of issues with encoding metadata in RDF/OWL (and even plain old XML). (The W3C Metadata Activity then grew into the Semantic Web Activity.)

What is needed is simple, and has been done before, by TimBL himself. He took the complex SGML and made a simpler HTML from it. Just by taking the most common core and simplicity wins out. SGML was for the hard-core publisher - which is not what your typical web user is. They needed something a lot simpler and lighter to use every day.

So following this, take only the “best bits” from both RDF and OWL, and the most “useful” bits - and create a new subset that is easy to use, implement, and more importantly, to understand.

I call this the Semantic Web Markup Language (SWML) - pronounced Swim-elle.

SWML will also make Linked Data more obvious and clearer and the one thing that will save the Semantic Web (ie Linked Data) should flourish and deliver on some of the promises...

How to do this? W3C needs to change and the Semantic Web leadership needs to make the (tough?) call and create a new group to design SWML. It’s been done before. The time is ripe for it to happen again.

Why I quit Facebook (integrity intact)

renato@iannella.it — 2010-06-17T10:54:03+10:00

As a researcher in the space of privacy and social networks, Facebook has been a great real-world use case of the pitfalls that these services need to deal with, and the challenges to researchers and developers to solve....Google runs a close second.
I contemplated leaving Facebook on May 31st (the Quit FaceBook Day) but decided not too. After all, I should be aware of the issues and technically capable to control my Privacy options on Facebook (and any other Social Network...)
However, today I feel insulted by the CEO of Facebook (Mr Mark Zuckerberg) as his recent negative comments about multiple identities on social networks (eg one for work, one for family, one for soccer mates, etc) - which in my view is essential for social systems to support as this is how humans naturally behave - with this quote:

“Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity”

So, Mr Zukerberg thinks I lack integrity. This from a person who called all social network users “dumb f...ks” for sharing information.

Thank you Mr Zukerberg, you have made the decision to leave that much easier now.

The Semantic Web is like a Box of Chocolates

renato@iannella.it — 2010-06-16T11:09:57+10:00

The Semantic Web has had its challenges over the years in trying to become mainstream. One of the most promising subareas (that has the best chance) is Linked Data. Not that LD is dependent on the SW - all you really need is consistent and persistent URIs and a way to say “sameAs” in a number of ways....SKOS could help here.

Anyway, TBL’s recent talk entitled “Linked data: it's is not like that; it's like a bag of potato chips” (see the video and blog) was not the answer. LD is not like a Bag of Chips. The information on the back has been standardised by government and social requirements. There is no linking between a “nut allergy” on a Italian bag of chips to an Australian bag of chips. The analogy falls short.

I agree there needs to be better efforts to explain all parts of the SW to broaden it’s impact, and we really need good use cases, analogies, stories to do it....

Other wise we will end up with the Semantic Web being like a box of chocolates !

Dated URIs are Not That Cool

renato@iannella.it — 2010-03-10T12:02:17+10:00

Sometimes putting dates in URIs is good. These are nice and human friendly:

http://example.com/2005/annual-report
http://example.com/reports/2005/

When the W3C TAG released their findings on The Use of Metatdata in URIs, I make several comments to the public list about the use of Dates in URIs back in 2006.

The use of a date (eg year) to indicate when the URL was first created, and then subsequent paths added to the parent URI over time was a poor indicator for the human because they would infer that the date was the date of the resource.

So the above two URL are fine (the inference holds), but others do not, and do so badly:

http://example.com/2005/marketing/events.html

Are these events in 2005?

My point was that the date should be relevant to the resource (that the URI points to) not when the URL was created.

It gets worse. Just recently the W3C TAG released a new report:

http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2010/sum03.html

Wow? What do those dates mean?

Linked Data For the Masses?

renato@iannella.it — 2010-02-23T11:13:18+10:00

In a must-read blog, Brian Kelly looks deeply into Linked Data and asks if we have progressed since 1998 when Tim Berners Lee was looking for a Green Car under $15K here in Queensland.

The results are not what the Semantic Web community would like to see:

“the similarly trivial question which Tim Berners-Lee used back in 1998 – Is there a green car for sale for around $15000 in Queensland? – was perhaps responsible for misleading people into thinking the Semantic Web was for ordinary end users. I am now starting to wonder whether a better strategy for those involved in Linked Data activities would be to purposely distance it from typical end users and target, instead, identified niche areas.”

This resonates with my first blog:

“Could the Semantic Web be harmful? It could if it continues to steer resources towards an unobtainable goal in web-scale terms. Such resources could be used to provide more grass-roots level solutions”

We still have a long way to go....

Cool URIs DO Change

renato@iannella.it — 2010-02-02T09:38:21+10:00

Think that http URIs are cool....

The Semantic Web Considered Harmful?

renato@iannella.it — 2008-11-24T09:52:08+10:00

Should we worry about the Semantic Web? Read on...