> hi all, > > sorry to re-open that old can of worms, but v2 beta of Piggy Bank > has been released yesterday, which is the first implementation of > the proposed RDF-based tagging structure described in Stefano's > article... IMHO looking very promising and hopefully it will help to > tear down some of the walls between the pro and anti-RDF camps. this > is not another Haystack.
I doubt this will work, as it seems to have a built-in market failure in it's desire for pure data, even when pure is in quotes (the denatured word is a frequent trope in writing about the Semantic Web, as with attempts to deny that the words semantic or ontology mean what they mean.) The amount of data you can import in pure form is a *tiny* fraction of a percent of the available data, and a number of attempts at web-scale screen-scraping have failed (c.f., most recently, Kinja) because of a lack of 80/20 leverage, and because of the inherent brittleness of markup. Developers won't develop to standards of pure data unless not doing so puts them at a competitive disadvantage (where the competition is for attention.) Meanwhile, users are not clamoring for pure data, because many of the things that show up in the PB scenarios are coming, w/o any RDF. Piggy Bank Scenarios 1 and 2, integration of various addresses into a single map, have already been demonstrated by, inter alia, UpMyStreet and a raft of Google Map projects. Scenario 3, on the other hand, would not be solved by PB even if it were to succeed elsewhere -- the hurdle there is not markup of metadata but availability of metadata. If the producer of a site has not made the desired data available, there is no technology that can make it available, and if they have made it available, then sites like del.icio.us provide enough structure to copy and paste the details into any of the three relevant fields. The argument that it would be better to have everything pure so you don't have to do these one-at-a-time map projects or put the search costs on the user only holds if you assume that users will adopt non-useful technologies in hopes of catalyzing future uses, and that developers will develop for those imagined future uses as if there was no cost to doing so. And this market failure in turn undermines your formulation around RDF. There are no walls, and there is no anti-RDF camp. There are simply people building technologies that rely on metadata, using whatever they think are the best available tools, and that group includes, as subsets, people who do and don't use RDF. The latter camp outnumbers the former by, at a conservative guess, 2 orders of magnitude. The people not using RDF don't use it either because they don't know about it, or because they have decided that it has too many problems, including crappy explanations of its value, lousy XML serialization, an overly general conceptualization, and no tool set that provides speed at scale. -clay > > Begin forwarded message: > >> From: Eric Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >> Date: May 23, 2005 6:07:22 PM EDT >> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> Subject: Piggy-Bank 2.0 beta release >> Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >> >> The SIMILE project is happy to announce the Piggy-Bank 2.0 beta >> release. Piggy Bank is an extension to the Firefox web browser that >> turns it into a �Semantic Web browser�, letting you make use of >> information on the Web in more useful and flexible ways. >> >> Additional details regarding Piggy Bank including installation > guides, >> usage scenarios, technical documentation and ways in which you can >> help contribute to this work are all available on the Piggy Bank > Home >> Page: >> >> - http://simile.mit.edu/piggy-bank/ >> >> -- >> eric miller http://www.w3.org/people/em/ >> semantic web activity lead http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ >> w3c world wide web consortium http://www.w3.org/ > > _______________________________________________ > discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.del.icio.us/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.del.icio.us/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
