Tom Morris

Shelley Powers has been reviewing 'Everything is Miscellaneous': "He does touch on the semantic web, or the Semantic Web, but again this is covered lightly. More importantly, though, the coverage was hugely one sided. RDF is introduced only to immediately be dismissed. People interviewed to support a predefined view: RDF is bad, microformats good - and all covered in five or so pages... I would say the book would be rather simple to classify: it would fit nicely under 'religion'. Returning to the discussion on the semantic web, the coverage of RDF demonstrates one of the weaknesses of the entire book: David had a concept, a belief, and then sought out specific knowledge and other witnesses to the faith who would provide the evidence to support such."

RDF and the "upper case" Semantic Web sure have become a neat set of scare words for people. I wonder why people haven't gone the whole hog and just branded us undercover paedophiles and goat rapists. Yes, in between making OWL ontologies and finding ways to model reality on to URIs, we like to chop the heads off kittens! This is more a smear campaign than a reasoned discussion of technology.

Let me put this straight.

RDF is just a data model - like, say, a SQL database or a JSON file. The difference is that it uses URIs to represent things whenever possible.

Whether you want to use RDF to model a top-down hierarchial, Deweyesque catalogue systems or transmit loose emergent tags is up to the user. In finding old Boing Boing posts about, say, snuff movies, a loose tag system would work better than a strict ontology. But in a field like bioscience where a lot of problems can be explicitly defined, having a strict ontology may in fact be very useful. It's not an either/or.

This is something that Weinberger groks and has mentioned in his interview. But he, and others, continue to perpetuate the (perhaps useful) myth that RDF is only about the top-down, hierarchial systems when in fact it can be used for just about anything.

See Arguments against the Semantic Web. (I think that page title gives it far too much credit - "arguments against Semantic Web straw men and misconceptions" would perhaps be a more appropriate title).

I will, of course, read David's book, and I will put the bits I find to be wrong on aforementioned wiki page. Based on his Open Source appearance, I feel that I agree with a lot of what David says, it's just he's been trapped by the RDF naysayers.

Tags: semanticweb, semantic web, semweb, rdf, everythingismiscellaneous, everything is miscellaneous

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So Starbucks prints these slightly cheesy pop philosophy messages on the side of their cups. And so got in a right huff about it. It's been covered in that bastion of insanity the WingNutDaily.

What I find most interesting is that she's "offended".

Isn't that what us atheists are supposed to be? George W. Bush spends millions of dollars on the 'faith-based initiative', and atheists are "offended". The British government funds faith schools and we're just "offended" by it. And then the triumphant bishop or whatever writes a snarky column in the Guardian telling us to pull ourselves together and stop being offended by trivial little things like the separation of church and state and the Human Rights Act.

And yet they don't ever tell poor Ms. Incanno who has thrown a media hissy fit over her styrofoam cup to STFU. Could we be seeing just another hint of that ever rare beast - Christian hypocrisy?

Especially when one considers that, oh, Jonathan Wells of the Discovery Institute has a bullshit throwaway line about Darwinism being the cause of all evil in the world on one of the other Starbucks coffee cups...

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