[iDC] please make comments regarding semantic overlay term

[Danny Ayers]

On 17/03/2008, Sandy Klausner <klausner at coretalk.net> wrote:
> Alexis,
>
>  "Learn to program" is currently a very tough task for most humans.
>  Improving the manner in which both structures and behaviors are
>  conceived, maintained and shared would enable a much larger
>  population to get control of the data in which they "push" or "pull."

Agreed. Strongly agreed.

>  Doing this under the W3C stack is difficult

Usually, yes - even simple publication of documents on the web can be
difficult, if best practices are followed (i.e. using the specs). If
you add RDF to the mix, it gets significantly more difficult. Plugging
my own material again I'm afraid, but I argued this at [1].

But I don't think this because the stack is wrong per se - just that
typically the developer is led into using the technologies at an
inappropriate level of abstraction.
The basic conceptual models *are* simple (the graph model of RDF
particularly so), but they get obfuscated when you've got one eye on
the programming language and the other on the bytes down the wire.

I don't have an answer to what are more appropriate abstractions (my
best guess would be a very dumb version of old-AI agents), but am
optimistic such abstractions will emerge as people gain experience in
working with the stack. The Web is still very young, the Semantic Web
only barely sprouting.

> and not really scalable

In what sense? The Web has scaled using the same basic architecture
and underlying technologies as the Semantic Web.

>  to the full potential for a Semantic Web or what I believe will
>  become the Semantic Net.

What does your vision look like?

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] dannyayers.com/docs/ieee/w4

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