Yeah, that's been the observable behavior all the way 
back to MULTICS and possibly before.  A lot effort is 
tossed at a large problem but solving the smaller subproblems 
leads to useful bits.  Some say, dare to do less, and maybe 
that works, but sometimes daring to more gets a 
lot done, just not everything one set out to do. D'oh.

I'm no expert in this but...

The problem here is that the Semantic Web tech, 
as John Sowa and others point out on their lists, is 
recreating technology that has been successfully created 
before and worked well.  The difference is scale and 
architecture.  It seems to me that if it fails at 
the scale and architecture asked for, even if it 
leaves some useful bits behind, they are mostly the 
same useful bits we already have except for using 
URI naming.

len


From: Michael Champion [mailto:mc@x...]

On Jun 3, 2004, at 9:32 AM, DuCharme, Bob (LNG-CHO) wrote:

>  the semantic web is something that
> will inspire great ideas that get implemented in a different, more 
> practical
> project?

For what it's worth, that's exactly the point I was trying to make in 
my response to Len.