Walter, you've really got me going today. Here's more oversell from the
www originator at
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...web&print=true


"The Semantic Web will enable machines to COMPREHEND semantic documents
and data, not human speech and writings."

This reminds me of Bob B's anthropo-word.

Then:

"Meaning is expressed by RDF, which encodes it in sets of triples, each
triple being rather like the subject, verb and object of an elementary
sentence. These triples can be written using XML tags. In RDF, a
document makes assertions that particular things (people, Web pages or
whatever) have properties (such as "is a sister of," "is the author of")
with certain values (another person, another Web page). This structure
turns out to be a natural way to describe the vast majority of the data
processed by machines. Subject and object are each identified by a
Universal Resource Identifier (URI), just as used in a link on a Web
page. (URLs, Uniform Resource Locators, are the most common type of
URI.) The verbs are also identified by URIs, which enables anyone to
define a new concept, a new verb, just by defining a URI for it
somewhere on the Web."


"meaning ... expressed by RDF"? Anybody who's been around db's will
know that meaning cannot be expressed without agreement, which involves
language, not just syntax, and not by any particular machine format.
Anyone can define a new concept ... "just by" defining a URI? Give me a
break, there's a lot more to it than that.


This whole business depends on a sop to millions of programmers who are
are not very adept at low-level manipulation and would prefer not to
understand the purposes of an application, working for users many off
whom are being brainwashed to think that machines comprehend.
..

On Aug 10, 9:53*am, paul c <toledobythe... (AT) oohay (DOT) ac> wrote:
SciAm is quite respectable publication. It's a shame that they appared
to prefer political correctness to critical thinking too often, e.g.
Wobal Glorming (aka Climax Change).

Paul, as obnoxious as you are, I feel you hit the nail on the head here:

This is exactly my reservation about the 'semantic web'.
Then again, it is also my motivation for believing in the OO approach
to modeling (tying data and its use together) which you appear to be
so skeptical of.

--
Reinier