Thursday, June 17, 2004

Global Scalability

Semantic Web: Hype-Bubble or an interesting research area? Links to a comment made by on the SUO list "In 6 years (1998 to 2004) with ENORMOUS hype and funding, the semantic web has evolved from Tim BL's book to a few prototype applications, which are less advanced than technologies of the 1970s such as SQL, Prolog, and expert systems -- and they're doing it with XML, which is far less advanced than LISP, which was developed in the 1950s."

There are many interesting responses in the thread including one from Frederick Kintanar: "...I do think the Web makes a big difference between earlier knowledge representation efforts and Semantic Web initiative. A big one is global scalability, where the key element is URI's (and their already deployed global acceptance). Hypertext was already a relatively mature technology in the research community, when Tim Berners-Lee hit upon what is needed to make it scalable: global identification..."

And no this isn't scaling a single agreed upon ontology across the Web.

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