The email seems to have stirred up the entire SW community

This is another email from www-rdf interest grp.It has some interesting links to message boards.

-A

Dan Brickley wrote:
> * Stephane Fellah [2003-11-10 12:42-0500]
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>To those of us believing in Semantic Web, meta-data, ontologies and
>>such, this article by Clay Shirky:
>>
>> http://www.shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism.html
>>
>>might be quite traumatic. It posits that real world is too fuzzy and
>>too messy for any clean, deductive scheme to succeed.
>>I am curious to get your opinion on this article.
>>
>>Good read
>
> Probably the main conclusion I draw is that we should be clearer that
> the rules aspect of Semantic Web is the icing on the cake, rather than
> the ultimate goal. Data on the Web is the goal, and that’s perfectly
> achievable.
>

The articles that Clay refer to seem to be some of the worst or out of
context.

It was quite annoying and would seem to be purposeful that he takes
issue that the Semantic Web requires a global ontology - if you read any
of the pieces on how the Web (the Semantic Web included) has been
designed, even some of Clay’s pieces, you wonder how he could get that
wrong.

I typed this in from “Weaving the Web” and I still think it’s a fairly
accurate description of the Semantic Web:

“Databases are continually produced by different groups and companies,
without knowledge of each other. Rarely does anyone stop the process to
try to define globally consistent terms for each of the columns in the
database tables…If HTML and the Web made all online documents look
like one huge book, RDF, schema and inference languages will make all
the data in the world look like one huge database”

“If a reasoning engine had pulled in all the data and figured the taxes,
I could have asked it why it did what it did, and corrected the source
of the problem.

Being able to ask ‘Why?’ is important. It allows the user to trace back
to the assumptions that were made, and the rules and data used.
Reasoning eninges will allow us to manipulate, figure, find and provide
logical and numeric things over a wide-open field of applications.”

Anyway, there’s been more buzz about the Semantic Web in the last 4 days
than I’ve ever seen - most of it negative but a surprising number of
people (outside of the usual suspects) saying positive things about the SW:

http://stone.tuttlesvc.org:880/2003_11_09.html#000371
http://bitsko.slc.ut.us/blog/2003/11/09#xml-vs-rdf
http://mamamusings.net/archives/2003/11/10/shirky_touches_off_a_storm_of_semantic_web_posts.php
http://www.manageability.org/blog/stuff/clay-shirky-semantic-web

Begin forwarded message (from www-rdf-interest@w3.org):
—
To those of us believing in Semantic Web, meta-data, ontologies and
such, this article by Clay Shirky:

http://www.shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism.html

might be quite traumatic. It posits that real world is too fuzzy and
too messy for any clean, deductive scheme to succeed.
I am curious to get your opinion on this article.

Good read
—

I think this article is interesting (although some parts are quite boring).

My view is the following: Life is not perfect. The same goes for the Semantic Web. No one knows if the Semantic Web is the right thing or not until we actually try them out. It’s not important that the current technology is not perfect. What’s important is for the people who believe in the Semantic Web to actually build something useful that can potentially better everyday people’s life.

This is a very interesting blog on how the semantic web might not work out. It posits that real world is too fuzzy and
too messy for any clean, deductive scheme to succeed.
I am curious to get everybodys opinion on this article.

Shirky: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview