Just catching up with my newsfeeds, and I see this story from the W3C. It's an announcement of the "Common Web Language (CWL) Evaluation and Installation Incubator Group". Only problem is that it seems to be almost completely opaque to anybody outside of it. The XG charter describes CWL as a graphic language of semantic network with hyper node and is used to describe contents and meta-data of web pages in three different type of form such as UNL, CDL and RDF
. Anyone understand that? I don't. I get why one might want to describe content and meta-data of a web page in RDF - but why do I need to use UNL or CDL? That was my initial reaction.
But then I read this XG Report about the Common Web Language. And, my, that is really quite bonkers. It's Esperanto-over-HTTP! Finally, we have people who are barmier than us!
From what I can gather, the UNL/CDL effort is trying to map a fairly large set of human language into a limited vocabulary which is easier for machines to translate, and then using RDF to attach metadata. Instead of sitting down and writing in English or Japanese or German, one sits down and writes in UNL. Then, the browser has a UNL reader built in which automatically translates the UNL into the relevant local language. In short: machine readable Esperanto with RDF and OWL annotations. Right, own up: who at the W3C has been smoking crack? At least it makes us "HTML, microformats, RDF, SPARQL and a bit of OWL" pragmatic pick-and-mix types look completely sane in comparison. I don't want to go all negative-nancy on anyone, but anyone want to bet that this will actually take off? Have I got it all wrong - and we'll all be writing CWL instead of HTML and XML in five years time?
Oh my, here is their example of the beauty of the UNL syntax. Here's the English: Long ago, in the city of Babylon, people begun to build a huge tower, which seemed about to reach the heavens
. And here it is rewritten in UNL: begin.entry.past-- tim->long ago --plc->city.def --agt->people.def --obj->build.past--obj-> tower<- aoj--huge<- seem.past --obj->reach.bigin.soon--obj->tower --gol->heaven.def.pl
I propose a new rule of thumb, which I shall egotistically call Morris’ Law of Standards: however fucked up and crazy something is, someone, somewhere in a standards body is writing a parser, schema or proposal for it. CWL proves that. It really is machine readable Esperanto over HTTP. At least they (claim) to use N-Triples in their paper (it’s not, but don’t worry about it) - Esperanto re-expressed in RDF/XML would quite probably make my brain asplode.
