At 10:33 PM -0400 6/2/04, Michael Champion wrote:

>I do agree with the implication that it will be some stripped-down 
>essential subset of the semantic web technologies rather than the 
>complete corpus of academese that survives in the real world, even 
>the more controlled real world behind enterprise firewalls. 
>Unfortunately, I have no idea which subset that will be :-)


I do have an idea what that essential subset will be. The idea may be 
wrong, but I do have one.

The essential subset is using standard URIs to identify things: 
places, species, people, laws, etc. That seems useful to me. For 
instance, imagine a photo gallery that used URIs to identify the 
contents of each photo so the images could be searched. And I think 
that can be neatly wrapped up in XML+Namespaces.

But that's it. I don't see what RDF brings to the table. 
XML+Namespaces+URIs served over HTTP. Why do we need anything more?
-- 

   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