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• I'm not sure I understood your point
  2003-09-22 22:04:56  William Grosso | [Reply | View]
  
  
  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.