November 11, 2006
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Lobbying Congress on the Merits of the National Project
Paul,
No one "spends energy" to "set aside"
standards. They are merely ignored.
Your said: “The fact is (as Sowa and Newcomb and others will attest) the
topic map standard was not burn out due to the potential it had, it was
destroyed by the OWL and RDF camps.... which spend a lot of energy setting aside topic maps.”
Tim Berners-Lee achieved well-deserved fame from his work
on the WWW. That gave him sufficient
attention to promote his next bright idea, the Semantic Web. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a
notorious example of the "second system syndrome", as Fred Brooks
characterized it:
Beware the man
who is designing his second system.
Whereas the first system had to be developed on a limited budget
and was therefore small, lightweight, and simple, the successful designer gets
a much inflated budget for the second system.
As a result, he tries to throw in everything he did not have time or
funding to put into the first. Consequently, it grows to become an overbloated
disaster.
OWL and RDF were promoted by a great deal of hype, much of
which was financed by multimillions of euros from Nokia. That attracted
hundreds of impoverished students who wanted to get grants to support their
research.
Then the resulting publications gave the impression of a landswell
of work on the SemWeb. It attracted so
many "helpers" that the number of cooks thoroughly spoiled the broth
with more ideas than Tim B-L ever dreamed of.
Your said: “the big companies will do everything in their power to
prevent computer science from becoming not owned. “
That attributes far more foresight than they deserve.
John Sowa