Ian,
On 7/2/2010 3:39 AM, Ian Davis wrote:
On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 4:44 AM, Pat Hayes<[email protected]> wrote:
Jeremy, your argument is perfectly sound from your company's POV, but not
from a broader perspective. Of course, any change will incur costs by those
who have based their assumptions upon no change happening. Your company took
a risk, apparently. IMO it was a bad risk, as you could have implemented a
better inference engine if you had allowed literal subjects internally in
the first place, but whatever. But that is not an argument for there to be
no further change for the rest of the world and for all future time. Who
knows what financial opportunities might become possible when this change is
made, opportunities which have not even been contemplated until now?
I think Jeremy speaks for most vendors that have made an investment in
the RDF stack. In my opinion the time for this kind of low level
change was back in 2000/2001 not after ten years of investment and
deployment. Right now the focus is rightly on adoption and fiddling
with the fundamentals will scare off the early majority for another 5
years. You are right that we took a risk on a technology and made our
investment accordingly, but it was a qualified risk because many of us
also took membership of the W3C to have influence over the technology
direction.
I would prefer to see this kind of effort put into n3 as a general
logic expression system and superset of RDF that perhaps we can move
towards once we have achieved mainstream with the core data expression
in RDF. I'd like to see 5 or 6 alternative and interoperable n3
implementations in use to iron out the problems, just like we have
with RDF engines (I can name 10+ and know of no interop issues between
them)
I make this point in another post this morning but is your argument that
investment by vendors =
1) technology meets need perceived by users, and
2) technology meets the need in a way acceptable to users
??
What early majority? How long did it take HTML to take off? Or XML for
that matter, at least in its simpler forms?
As I say in another post, I am not suggesting I have an alternative but
am suggesting that we broaden the conversation to more than "we have
invested so much so we have to be right" sort of reasoning.
Hope you are having a great day!
Patrick
--
Patrick Durusau
[email protected]
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)
Another Word For It (blog): http://tm.durusau.net
Homepage: http://www.durusau.net
Twitter: patrickDurusau
