A little is not none!! (or, stop misquoting me about the Dark Side)
I’ve recently seen a number of posts that point to my Dark Side articles as Hendler gives up on URIs, says we don’t need semantics, etc. I want to be very clear - I believe that “A little semantics goes a long way” which is amazingly different than “no semantics is needed”!!
Here’s a little math that might help — if you divide a number by a small number, you get a result (it can be very large, cf. 1/.0000000001) but if you divide by 0, you get an undefined term (1/0 is not a very large term, it is an undefined term).
If you want a quote from me, use one of these, or make sure it is not antithetical to one of these:
i. URI agreement is crucial to terms being shared.
ii. A (very) small amount of OWL semantics makes RDFS usable for a much larger set of data integration problems and applications.
iii. OWL DL can be used for a number of important problems. However, this number is much smaller than the number of problems that the small amount of OWL could be used for at this point in time.
Real Web Applications can take great advantage of Semantic Web technologies. However, IMO this is true if and only if the above three “axioms” (summed up with my slogan “a little semantics goes a long way” [1]) are observed.
cheers
Jim Hendler
[1] this was the slogan on the 1998 SHOE T-shirt, put there by my students because they were sick and tired of hearing me say it. I wish we’d thought to make it a trademark 
