Month: May 2003

Language stacking

as i move deeper into the semantic web waters, i discover the familiar tower of abstractions concept. to date, the following stack seems to emerge:

LBase

OWL (Web Ontology Language)

RDF

XML Schema

XML

the idea behind all this:

There will be many Semantic Web languages, most of which will be built on top of more basic Semantic Web language(s). It is important that this layering be clean and simple, not just for human understandability, but also to enable the construction of robust semantic web agents that use these languages.

as noted in the same document, this will not be easy:

this strategy places a very high burden on the ‘basic’ layer, since it is difficult to anticipate the semantic demands which will be made by all future higher layers, and the expectations of different development and user communities may conflict.

natural language and meaning is so much less formalized than programming languages, and yet we fail to even abstract them without leaks. will our attempts to do the same in the realm of semantics fare any better?

Away

i was spirited away (and scented away by the wonderful perfume emanating from the girl on the seat next to me) by one of the best animated films i have seen to date. the grotesque figures and features mesmerized me for the full 2 hours. highly recommended.

Bits are forever

someone from DSpace will give a talk at oscom 3.

As a joint project of MIT Libraries and the Hewlett-Packard Company, DSpace provides stable long-term storage needed to house the digital products of MIT faculty and researchers.

fighting bit rot is a very noble goal. will they be able to not only overcome all the technical issues, but find long-term, stable ontologies to describe their content too? i hope i can get answers in cambridge.