Talk:Semantic Web

Excellent Eduzendium work

I'm enjoying the added content in this article, and learning from it

A mechanical observation: starting from an existing stub that has all the CZ metadata and overhead in place, a standard lede, etc., may be a very promising way to do Eduzendium.

If you can split the code lines so they don't have to scroll horizontally, that would be desirable, but I don't know if the example is allowed to split to multiple lines. Howard C. Berkowitz 18:28, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! I followed your advice on line-splitting (the syntax is okay) and tried to simplify some of the language. There's still some cleaning up to do before tomorrow evening (due date). I can understand if CZ editors may wish to move off some of the technical stuff to separate pages, we just wanted to cover a bit of everything.

I'm not sure what your mechanical observation referred to, and if we did it correctly or not. Blake Willmarth 04:14, 13 August 2010 (UTC)

My observation meant you did something wise: starting with an article that had the proper CZ formatting rather than fight the learning curve. Your efforts, which are appreciated, went into adding meaningful content. Thanks! 04:47, 13 August 2010 (UTC)

'Triplestore' and other observations

In §2.1, the article states that "triplestore" is the "data convention" for the Semantic Web. This is kind of a clumsy way of putting it. You can have triples that aren't in a triplestore: the triples exist in a conceptual space before actually being codified into a representation or put into a triplestore.

Rather, I'd say that the concept of triples underlies RDF - although a few other things underly RDF, and to understand RDF you need to understand the constraints placed on the triple: namely, the data types that can be put into each of the three positions in the triple (subjects containing URIs or BNodes, predicates containing URIs and objects being URIs, BNodes, untyped literals, untyped literals with language tags or typed literals). The set of those triples put together can produce a graph, and you can store one or more triples in a triplestore - although the triplestore may add further constraints on what gets put into it - like that the triple must be affiliated with a graph. Again, you can have RDF that isn't in a triplestore - in fact, RDF that is stored in a file (say, XML or RDFa) - is not necessarily in a triplestore, just as data in a CSV file or a spreadsheet needn't be loaded into a traditional database. To use that analogy, you can have a relational model without it existing in an actual database - it may exist on a scrap of paper or just inside the mind of the programmer.

"Although using RDF is compact, it is not easily human readable." This is not true because it conflates RDF with one particular serialization of RDF - namely RDF/XML. RDF is just the data-model. It is true that RDF/XML isn't particularly human readable, but to say that RDF isn't easily readable by humans is mistaken. I know people who can read RDF/XML perfectly well! (I may be the rare exception there.) But rather the point is that there are other RDF serializations - Notation3, Turtle, TriX and so on. One could even produce a graphical RDF serialization that used basically vectors and a graphical format to structure triples - and that would be very easy-to-read.

A few other issues:

Facebook's Open Graph Protocol is a proper name and ought to be capitalised.

I'm also a bit unsure about the section on microformats. It says that the Semantic Web is closely tied to microformats. I don't buy that: opinions about the Semantic Web differ within the microformats community (and vice versa) - many see the Semantic Web as being antithetical to the approach of microformats - they say it is too academic, not driven by the practical realities of the web and so on, and reject a number of the philosophical and practical ideals of the "upper-case Semantic Web" community (as they say) - namely, they reject things like namespaces and the separation of syntax from semantics. They also see that many implementations of RDF on the web fail the "don't repeat yourself" principle that they hold dear. Indeed, microformats are put forward by some as an alternative to RDF-based data on the web. So, to say they are "closely tied" seems to be wrong in my experience. –Tom Morris 16:46, 13 August 2010 (UTC)

Pat's review of this article

I appreciate this detailed and thoughtful beginning (though it is still unpolished and possibly would benefit from some restructuring). In the following subsections (to be added shortly), I will record notes about some things I noticed in the version available at the end of the course:Pat Palmer 19:16, 18 August 2010 (UTC)