by James Hendler

Following a few links from Planet RDF (thanks to Kingsley Idehen and to Henry Story) I got to Tim O’Reilly’s article “Freebase will Prove Addictive” (or as Henry referred to it “O’Reilley groks the Semantic Web.”) Reading the post I felt compelled to reply - rather than sending you to my response, I repeat it here (violating a rule of the blogosphere) in part because it will be easier for me to find it again, but also in part because this will show up on PlanetRDF, where my thanks to those who pointed us there can be seen. (Jim Hendler)

My response to O’Reilly:

I’m glad you’re beginning to grok what the Semantic Web is about, but I must take issue with your claim that “unlike the W3C approach to the semantic web, which starts with controlled ontologies, Metaweb adopts a folksonomy approach, in which people can add new categories (much like tags), in a messy sprawl of potentially overlapping assertions.” If you look st what I’ve been writing since 2001 (in the Semantic Web article in Scientific American, coauthored w/Tim Berners-Lee and Ora Lassila) through my recent posts on the “Dark side of the Semantic Web” - I, and many others, have not been arguing for controlled ontologies - rather, we designed the Semantic Web technologies, and especially OWL, to encourage linking and reuse. We do believe there will be some carefully controlled ontologies in high value areas (such as the Cancer ontology which the national cancer institute maintains) but that much use would be by extension and linking to these - and if you’d ever attended one of my talks or Tim’s on the Semantic Web, you’d see slides where we show exactly overlapping vocabularies that grow and link. In fact, I was the primary author of the FAQ for the OWL langauge (http://www.w3.org/2003/08/owlfaq.html) and you might look at the section on how OWL compares to earlier languages - we emphasize the WEB nature of RDF and OWL, and point out that open and extensible are two of the key design factors.

With due respect, I think you, and even more aggresiously Clay Shirkey, have been misrepresenting what the Semantic Web is, and critiquing based on that misunderstanding, not on the reality. Folks like Danny Hillis and Nova Spivack who were listening got it, and it is very gratifying to see MetaWeb, RadarNetworks, Joost and others embracing the Semantic Web and its technologies. We’ve said all along the Sem Web is open, Web friendly, and that openness and linking were the key, just as they are on the text Web. Now that the vision is coming into focus, please give us our due - we welcome this new and exciting work, but it is what we’ve been advocating for years, not a contradiction to it.
-Jim Hendler

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Personal Ramblings, Semantic Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.