Archive for February, 2005

Ontological Hell

Tuesday, February 8th, 2005

Marc is talking about ways to organize ?tags?. Organizing tags in a hierarchy of namespaces (or filtering with manually managed social networks) is just another way of proposing ontological hell. A middle ground between wide open tagging and namespaces would be for tags with ambiguous definition to cite the particular definition in the dictionary to [...]

My RDF Litmus Test

Thursday, February 3rd, 2005

Here is my litmus test of RDF. If someone feels that rdf:type is optional, and at best a hint, then that person ?gets it?, and has the same view of the ?semantic web? vast potential as I do. If that person feels that rdf:type is critical, then they are clearly locked in 1980s thinking and [...]

ACLU Stomping Free Speech?

Thursday, February 3rd, 2005

The ACLU is trying to get you to panic about free speech. Attacking the government and corporations is fine, but once every single individual in the country becomes a pantechnicon-toting pal recording everything in their personal experience willing to share observations with anyone else, it’s going to be impossible to prevent the pizza scenario from [...]

Cheap Metadata

Tuesday, February 1st, 2005

For years, we have heard otherwise intelligent people carp about how ?metadata will never work?. But history has marched on, showing example after example of sucecssful applications of metadata. The nabobs have been forced to continually tweak their embarassing position, now warning us all that ?application of metadata to problem X using technique Y will [...]