[georss] The 7 f(laws) of the semantic web" includes RSS example

[Carl Reed OGC Account]

All -

There is an interesting critique (in a positive way) of the semantic web titled "The 7 f(laws) of the semantic web" by Dan Zambonini (xml.com). The following is from that article. Interesting he is using RSS as an example of one of the issue of the semantics web. I sent Dan an email suggesting that location is also a great way to link content - not just URIs.

Cheers

Carl

1. Not all Semantic Web data are created equal.
If you do a ball-park estimate with Google, you'll find about 5-10 million RDF files on the web, in various formats. Many of these are FOAF, most are RSS (the RDF versions). Sounds pretty successful, doesn't it? On top of that, we have a whole bunch of semantic web data being created by life sciences groups, policing departments, and others.

But semantic web data does not necessarily build the Semantic Web (big S, big W) - the (or, at least, my) vision of a Utopian web of data. How come?



All of that data being created by the life sciences, and other similar groups, is behind closed doors. It isn't available to the public, and doesn't hook into any web. As far as the Semantic Web is concerned, they could be using Turbo Pascal, rather than RDF and SPARQL.

And RSS? Well, there are two types of semantic web data - useful, and not so useful (with regards to building the hooked-up 'Semantic Web'). And I'd guess that 99.9% of RSS data comes under the latter classification.

RDF data really needs to have URIs as the three parts of the triple in order to fully enable the 'joining up' of data. But the vast majority - in fact, probably all - of RSS data has at least one 'string literal', e.g.

http://www.news.com/news-story
has a
http://www.metadata.com/property/subject
of
"Science/Nature"

Which isn't too handy when it comes to hooking this data up to news items about "Science" or "Technology" or "Nature" - or basically any string literal that doesn't match "Science/Nature". So the RSS data doesn't really help.

Carl Reed, PhD
CTO and Executive Director Specification Program
OGC

The OGC: Helping the World to Communicate Geographically

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