As soon as the big b-webs realize they cant have their own meta-data schemes competing with their own desire for de facto standards we'll all be better off, and off to a long boom.

Can you talk some sense into them, Marc ?

Marc,

I think there's a real problem here. And this isn't about doers vs. talkers or the W3C vs. Microsoft.

This is about top-down megalomanic grandiosity vs. bottom-up design. I've wanted to do something, a little extension to FOAF for a week now. And I still don't even know how to start, despite ping-ponging between the W3C site, RDFWeb and various online tutorials. (And note half the intro tutorial links on the W3C site seem to be broken.)

If I'd taken the Dave Winer approach, I'd have opened up my text editor, hacked the first data-structure I thought would suit using XML, and I'd be away writing Python to read and write it. I'd be doing. And maybe some other people would be doing something with it too.

As it is, I haven't even found out how to add a boolean property to a FOAF person tag. And I'm totally confused by the RDF definitions of properties, values and statements.

Once again, if I'd taken the Winer route, I'd have posted some maximal examples on a web page and assumed I'd finished my draft definition. With RDF I suppose I haven't really defined anything until I've written a schema, and God only knows how long it would take me to figure out that!

Anyway, I've pretty much used up the three days I figured I could afford to spend on this little learning exercise. Without writing a line of code, or even teaching myself much more than that RDF is extremely complicated and / or badly documented.

My enthusiasm and excitement about FOAF has considerably abated. I still think it's a pretty cool idea, but why the fuck does it have to be this hard?

So how does this tie in with Clay's piece? And the Semantic Web? For one thing, I think the semantic web is meant to be MORE than merely adding machine readable markup to the web. XML is perfectly OK for that. No the Semantic Web *is* about creating a yet higher level common language which allows machines to describe those machine readable markup formats.

So although Clay is wrong if he says that the semantic web requires a common ontology of all data. It certainly *does* require that all ontologies are defined in a common meta-language. And certainly one of the motivations for that, is that at some point in the future, it will be possible to write automatic translations between documents written using different ontologies.

In fact, it's hard to see any other motivation for the use of RDF schemas rather than XML DTDs.
And despite protestations to the contrary this really *is* what AI foundered on.

i agree with most of Zbigniew's thoughts about "social routing". any system can not predict complex individual perceptions, more over in the complex sphere of relationships. in that context, i am rather surprised to find point 4 (in Zbigniew's site) which states: "the routing algorithms can compete between themselves and evolve by natural selection". does it mean automation, user driven choices or an ai application which learns and reacts with users actions and choices? if it's the 1st and/or 3rd idea, which social or philosophical theory would that algorithm be based upon?

Another thought: I know what a syllogism is. Classic case:
All men breathe air
Socrates is a man
Therefore, Socrates breathes air.

This is classic. Now we can 'fuzzify' the boundaries in all kinds of ways. We can say 'Most men breathe air' with probabilistic or modal logic qualifiers. Even with these qualifiers, is deductive logic saying everything it can about men? No it isn't. But was it supposed to? And this is where I differ with Mr. Shirky. The two premises are taken on faith. The power of the syllogism in in the movement from the premises to the conclusion. Is this brittle, like AI? Yes. Can we soften it? I think so. Can it be bottoms up. I guess it could, but I don't know how, syllogisms don't run backwards. Because we are trying to use syllogisms doesn't mean we can't use induction. What I think is happening is that we are trying to develop a model. By its nature, a model is an abstraction. If Clay has a better model, then I'm all ears.

"If he is saying local experiments will ultimately win out, yeah, tell me something I don't know. "

Pretty much. I think that's what he's saying.

His syllogism is something like this.

All local experiments win out over big, centralized ones.

The "Semantic Web" TM (ie. not all examples of machine readable metadata in XML) is a big, centralized one.

Therefore ...

I'm with you Chris. I don't think Clay has any inkling about logic, mathematical, rhetorical, modal, or otherwise. I think he stepped all over himself since he has claimed the chair of having the last word on everything: a occupational hazard. At least he got many like myself pissed at him. Maybe it will drive us to create something that will prove him wrong--an example of unintended consequences.
In the end analysis, I'm not going to discontinue my researches not matter what Mr. Shirky says. His ineptitude on this issue has demonstrated itself.