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Weblog:   Distributed Computing Economics and the Semantic Web
Subject:   I'm not sure I understood your point
Date:   2003-09-22 22:04:56
From:   wegrosso
Response to: Orthogonal Issues

I think we agree that RDF is a data model, and the semantic web is a vision wherein everyone can publish their data (as RDF triplets, or elements of an OWL knowledgebase, or whatever) and the entire internet becomes an enormous distributed knowledgebase.


Now, my point is that Gray's paper implies this is exactly the wrong thing to build. Or, at least, a very inefficient and costly thing to build. Because it pushes you into architectures where you collect vast amounts of data, aggregate them in centralized servers (or groups of servers), and then compute.


And your answer concedes the point (I think)-- you're talking about pushing data around till it arrives at the right location.


Gray's point is that efficiency (economics) says: don't gather data. Instead, distribute computation using the highest level APIs you can find or build.


While, technically speaking, RDF and the Semantic Web don't prevent high level APIs, the current efforts also don't foster it. As far as I know (and I'm willing to be corrected; please give me references), the vast majority of efforts are focused on publishing data.


And that was my point. Why focus early efforts in a place where the economics are so unwieldy? I came up with three candidate arguments, none of which felt compelling.


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  • the SemWeb doesn't really bear on this issue
    2003-09-23 13:22:26  anonymous2 [View]




    Obviously there's a certain amount of distribution natural in the universe. Knowledge is created in some places and consumed in others, etc. You're thinking that the Semantic Web presumes that processing will only be done at the consumer end? Of course the producer may publish processed views.

    You want the consumer to be able to ask the producer to process it in custom ways? That involves downloading code, right? Arguably, the best SemWeb approach to code is Horn rules, which fit naturally into query languages -- so a consumer could ask a producer for the answer to some query, where the query involves arbitrary processing. Does that give you what you want? I'm cool with that, although it seems like no one really want to run anyone else's code.

    Of course RDF Query work is still in early stages; right now almost everyone just fetches an RDF/XML file, however big it is. That is a rather bandwidth-rich approach, of course. Some query designs do allow rules, however, so if the policies allow it, the client can ask the server to pre-process the data to make it smaller.

    sandro@w3.org

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