I’ve been mulling over this for a while, and seeing as I am home sick (can’t you tell from the rush of posts?) I’m going to give it a go. This definitely comes with a health warning as it goes way beyond what I know much about at any technical level. This is therefore handwaving of the highest order. But I haven’t come across anyone else floating the same ideas so I will have a shot at explaning my thoughts.
The Semantic Web, RDF, and XML are all the product of computer scientists thinking about computers and information. You can tell this because they deal with straightforward declarations that are absolute. X has property Y. Putting aside all the issues with the availability of tools and applications, the fact that triple stores don’t scale well, regardless of all the technical problems a central issue with applying these types of strategy to the real world is that absolutes don’t exist. I may assert that X has property Y, but what hppens when I change my mind, or when I realise I made a mistake, or when I find out that the underlying data wasn’t taken properly. How do we get this to work in the real world? Continue reading “Semantics in the real world? Part I – Why the triple needs to be a quint (or a sext, or…)”