On Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:17:39 +1100, Henri Sivonen <hsivo...@iki.fi> wrote:
On Jan 3, 2009, at 17:05, Dan Brickley wrote:
But perhaps a more practical concern is that it unfairly biases things
towards popular languages - lucky English, lucky Spanish, etc., and
those that lend themselves more to NLP analysis. The Web is for
everyone, and people shouldn't be forced to read and write English to
enjoy the latest advances in Web automation.
Some languages are higher in the pecking order than others when software
development is prioritized, and RDFa cannot level the playing field here.
Suppose there's a use case that can be satisfactorily addressed by
applying NLP heuristics to content for the top-tier languages. Even if
there were an RDF mechanism for addressing the same use case without
relying on natural language, software aimed for serving the top-tier
languages would still do the NLP thing for the use case.
No. There is no reason for most developers to prefer one over the other
under the circumstances described.
Clearly Google has an investment in text-harvesting in a bunch of
languages. Equally clearly its competitors who are more sucessfeul in
various languages (Yandex, Baidu, etc) have an investment in the
technology they use.
But developing a new indexing process, there is no a priori reason to
favour NLP over some other technique that is also satisfactory, and if you
happen to be interested in a global market, it makes sense to develop a
system that can be more easily adapted, other things being equal.
...
Instead of bearing the cost of developing a totally alternative
technology stack for the other languages without benefiting from any
spillover from the effort done for the top-tier languages, it makes more
sense to invest the effort into building upon the reusable parts already
developed for the top-tier languages.
Except that it turns out that the re-usable parts of most search engines,
for the general developer, are pretty limited. Whereas the re-usable parts
of the RDF stack are numerous, available for many different platforms,
from GPL open source to bespoke commercial closed-source and everything
between.
All this does not necessarily establish the case for using RDF in HTML, it
is just meant to demonstrate that this particular case *against* doesn't
seem to be established, to me.
cheers
Chaals
--
Charles McCathieNevile Opera Software, Standards Group
je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
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