Sjoerd Visscher's weblog

My ideas about new web technology that can change the future of the world wide web.

< Tuesday, September 10, 2002 >

Mail from Sean B. Palmer

Sean B. Palmer notified me that the conversion of the Scripting News RSS file to RDF wasn't working properly. That's because while I was sleeping, Dave added a namespace to the RSS file. It's fixed now.

Sean also told me he is working on Semantic Schemata. We're very much on the same line. I'll quote from his proposal:

"Decentalization" and "grounding semantics in the Web" are cliches, but for a good reason. As stated before, the semantics behind particular markup constructs vary over the contexts in which they are created, used, and otherwise interpreted. With the Web, we have the real opportunity to create some semblance of a shared context - we can agree to use terms without any one particular group dictating what will be.

With the introduction of XML namespaces, it made many buzzwords possible (for each new acronym created, at least ten buzzwords appear); decentralization, evolution, transformability. One of the key technologies for connecting the semantics of each language together is RDF. In fact, the various serializations of RDF are not important, but the model is.