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by Michael Cote.
Original Post: "Is the Semantic Web Hype?":
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The following statements are nonsense
"RDF is more semantic than XML"
"RDF allows us to reason concretely about the real world"
"The power of RDF is its semantic model"
Watching the RDF wheel spin around in the proverbial mud has always been interesting, but disappointing. There's an ass-load of text -- or "churn" as some call it -- spent explaing what seems like a simple concept, i.e.,
RDF Term
Example
Subject
DrunkAndRetired.com
Predicate
Created by
Object
Coté
S.S. Abstraction
In the more concrete coding world, we have the concept of "over-abstraction": basically, the design for something is so high-level and abstract that it's useless for any practical application. Ed dubbed this concept the "S.S. Abstraction." Usually when the S.S. Abstraction docks at your port, you spend a lot of time writing and talking about design before writing a prototype or executing any code; that is, there are completly groundless design claims made. At first blush, one thinks programmers are very scientific and numbers oriented; after just a slight dip in the stream though, you realize coders are very superstitious, non-Baconian type people: we practically follow our own form of computational voodoo.
Back to RDF...
After reading the presentation, esp. the quotes pulled from XML big-wigs, my feelings that RDF is an example of the S.S. Abstraction in the standards world. That is, the RDF standard is evolving without enough testing for it's usability as a technology; that is, how useful and easy it is for programmers to use RDF.
On a brighter note, it is a very young standard, and there does seem to be quite a bit of self-corrective kick-backing going on. As one of the quotes in the presentation says,
25 years ago, Ed Feigenbaum described
Terry Winograd's work (on Artificial
Intelligence) as a "breakthrough in
enthusiasm."
I worry that web services and the semantic
web, in their reliance on effective
computational semantics are vulnerable to
the same criticism.
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