The internet is sh*t

Pretty good rant.

Worth reading.
[update: 2004-05-25: but it does go on a bit]

Semantic Web: we just need to make up vocabularies

Primer - Getting into the semantic web and RDF using N3

I got here from this Slashdot comment to slashdot story about Tim Berners Lee speaking this week on the Semantic Web.

Scanning this primer to get a sense of the landscape ... (disclaimer, this is taken completely of out context and so it might not be fair)

These are the RDF, RDF schema, and OWL namespaces, respectively. They give us the core terms which we can bootstrap ourselves into the semantic web. I am also going to assume that the empty prefix stands for the document we are writing, which we can say in N3 as

@prefix : <#> .

This means we could have the example above as

:pat :child [ :age 4 ] , [ :age 3 ].

which is slightly less characters to type. Now you understand how to write data in N3, you can start making up your own vocabularies, because they are just data themselves.

Aside from the slightly annoying error in usage (" ... is slightly less characters to type.") the ability to produce defined vocabularies doesn't yield interoperable meaning. Does it? It's a start to allow strings like "Title" to be locally defined. But it doesn't help searching if for users of one vocabulary "Title" really is understood to be a name for a document or book and in another vocabulary it means, say, bowel movement.

This really requires a lot of study to have coherent thoughts about it. I wish we were more realistic about the effort required.