At 8:21 PM +0200 6/3/04, J.Pietschmann wrote:

>Well, I'm with Clay Shirky that the semantic web is still a bit
>far away for the general public, but there are definitively
>interesting use cases within organizations. Think of support
>for semi-automated mapping of data fields from several interface
>standards onto DB fields. Of course you still need to put a lot
>of manual labour into refining the ontologies and possibly custom
>enhancements for the inference engine, but even a 70% correct
>generated mapping or impact analysis saves already a lot of work.


In the words of Clara Peller, "Show me the beef." I keep hearing 
people say things like "semi-automated mapping of data fields from 
several interface
  standards onto DB fields" but I don't know what that means or why I 
should care. More importantly, I can't find anyone actually doing 
using semantic web technologies to solve problems. It's sort of like 
cattle mutilations: you hear all these stories about surgically 
precise organ extraction, but every single time you actually drive 
your pickup out in the field and look at a mutilated cow, it's a very 
non-precise coyote attack. Well, every time I drive my pickup over to 
a semantic web success story what I find is XML and custom code, with 
little if any RDF or OWL. Certainly that's what I kept hearing at WWW 
2004 in every semantic web case study. If there are real success 
stories here, then shouldn't someone be able to demonstrate one?

-- 

   Elliotte Rusty Harold
   elharo@m...
   Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
   http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA