Interesting observation/comment. There is a serious part of me that truthfully completely agrees with the sentiment.

In fact, one of the curious things I am finding while working my way through "Programming the Semantic Web" is the almost religous compulsion of the author (and it is not limited to the authors of that book...I have been working through a couple of other Semantic Web resources) to "hype" what I can only describe as an almost "holy grail" committment to the Semantic Web and its ability to "enable machine digestion and comprehension" of information.

I remember (and I'm sure I'm dating myself) when "relational databases" were the "holy grail" of information management. This smells very much like the "hype" I remember back then, too.

However, while that "hype" tends to turn me off; I have seen and continue to see some pretty impressive and worthy applications. The flexibilty, while it comes at a pretty big price, is...at least for me...a relief from years of having tried to help folks cope with very fragile and "in concrete" data base structures that needed to chage to a new structure. On that basis alone, I am seeing some definite value to the semantic web architecture.

But...and here is, for me, the thing that makes what you've alluded to even more worrisome. The original concept encapsulated information in the holy "triples" framework and I have seen some impressive and pretty terrific appliations developed around that paradigm (to use an already overused term). But apparently, the magic "triples" are being driven to be "quadruples", "femtuples", etc.

My experience tells me that a good indicator that we haven't found that "holy grail" yet is when the current contender has to grow and grow to handle more and more complex situations.

I come from an old school that believes pretty strongly in Occum's Razor.

So I suspect that we "aren't there yet". But, at the same time, if I get past the hype, I can see some pretty impressive advantages and applications for the basic concept of the Semantic Web.

Thanks for your comment. I respect it a lot.

ack Albuquerque, NM

In reply to Re^2: Meditating on Perl, Python and the Semantic Web by ack
in thread Meditating on Perl, Python and the Semantic Web by ack

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