Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Copious Quality Content from Copia

An assessment of RDF/OWL modelling "We conclude that RDF/OWL is particularly suited to modelling applications which involve distributed information problems such as integration of data from multiple sources, publication of shared vocabularies to enable interoperability and development of resilient networks of systems which can cope with changes to the data models. It has less to offer in closed world or point- to-point processing problems where the data models are stable and the data is not to be made available to other clients."

"This same ability to handle irregular and optional data without losing all typing and structure information is also relevant to handling change over time.

A common requirement in many system designs is to allow loose coupling between
clients and providers so that the providers can evolve over time without breaking existing clients (backward compatibility) and older providers can successfully respond to updated clients (forward compatibility).

Achieving this resilience to change is simpler using RDF/OWL than using a strict schema-validation approach, particularly due to the open world assumption."

Via, del.icio.us bookmarks for 2006-03-10.

Semantic hairball, y'all "if you had any idea how deadly seriously Big Business is taking this stuff: it's popular in terms of dollars and cents, even if it's not the gleam in your favorite blogger's eye). On one hand we have the Daedalos committee fastening labyrinth to labyrinth. On the other hand we have the tower of Web 2.0 Babel. We need a mob in the middle to burn 80% of the AI-one-more-time-for-your-mind-magic off of RDF, 80% of the chicago-cluster-consultant-diesel off of MDA, 80% of the toolkit-vendor-flypaper off of Web services. Once the ashes clear, we need folks to build lightweight tools that actually would help with extracting value from distributed information systems without scaring off the non-Ph.D.s."

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