Article:		RDF: Ready for Prime Time
Subject:		Bright new future ?
Date:		2003-08-06 06:12:03
From:		Stefan Daume
I like your example of "road" being used as a metaphor, because it highlights the problems of the semantic web. One way of approaching this is to assume that there is some authority that defines the meaning of a particular word in a given context (i.e. the author). Whether, a word is intended to stand as a metaphor for a specific concept is down to the reader. The same is true for linguistic variables in general. In order to solve this problem of viewpoints standard ontologies have to be in place that content providers conform to. This however seems a long way off. Actually, I doubt that we will ever see the generic RDF-based search engine that you suggest. I guess this will limited to very few and very specific domains. Personally, I think that RSS is the most convincing example for RDF. Simply because of the amount of data that is already there and is accessible. If RDF is a success story it is because of RSS. FOAF seems to be the example that is closest "in spirit" to RDF, simply because you can link different instances of RDF documents and infer new information.

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