Raw

[quote]

During the "another few years" that Richard suggests[,] the folks building on naive quasi-XML will be devoting their time to hacking through the undergrowth: working around spec shortcomings, findings answers to questions, many of which have long since been figured out around RDF (and better-practice XML). They won't be able to solve 80% of the SemWeb problems by magic - it's taken a good few years work around RDF.

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The difference will be that the work of "hacking through the undergrowth: working around spec shortcomings, findings answers to questions, many of which have long since been figured out around RDF" will be done by the "naive" school *in public*.



With communities of thousands of users depending on the format and tools for their everyday needs, there'll be "many eyeballs" identifying problems and suggesting workarounds and fixes. The naive community will probably address the problems in order of actual pain they cause, undoubtedly leaving dozens unsolved altogether, but solving the big ones to most people's satisfiction in a fairly short time.



[quote]From the existing tools this will only need a little GUI work and a bit of packaging.[/quote]



It's *not* the GUI that's the problem!! It's the upfront extra-thinking : me, the user, translating my understanding of the world into an appropriate model. If you can find a way to hide *that* from the user, you really will (honestly) have my admiration. But I think the best that will come of it is some canned RDF forms for well-understood, popular applications. But if *that's* all we're talking about, you might as well just stick to writing scrapers to convert the data from the tools that already exist in these areas.@en