The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview
Harry Chen, 4:12pm 10 November 2003Begin 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.

