Semantic web as future reality
Semantic web as future reality
This entry at Fred on Something neatly summarises my painful experiences while reading the W3 specs and assorted tutorial this weekend:The thing is that RDF is not intended to be easily understood by humans like simple XML documents. RDF is intended to be understood by machines.
However, I still think the lack of accessibility of the W3 specs is a big problem. The XML spec is reasonably accessible. Even the XML Schema spec is. I can sit down with them, read them, and start writing a parser. Granted, it wouldn’t be a very good parser if I didn’t know more than I’d learned from a single reading of the specs, but I’d be able to.It’s less important that the formats are inaccessible if the specs are easily accessible so we get good tools to deal with them.
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You are completely right. It’s sure that if the base specification’s document is not readable and understandable, we are in troubles. Personally i was talking about the resulting code, but the problem you rise is much more important. Every future softwares will be based on these documents.
The problem of documentation is deep in computer sciences. It’s why there are vulgarization contest in universities. Another problem is that many people think that putting useless mathematical formulas or incomprehensible words is essential to have credibility. In the present case, it is not. You are right: these technologies need to be understand by the average computer scientist or hobbyist. It’s essential to spread the good news and encourage them to develop software that use it.
I hope that people will write code example and clarified documents about these new technologies. Personally I would have some problems to do it considering my current English writing but I’m sure some will.
