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Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
I am a strong supporter of the semantic web and so it was with some concern that I read Mark Pilgrim - someone who's writing I admire - speak out against the concept over the holidays. There's a link to his argument in this article, and also a reply offered by the author, a reply that is not so much a point by point rebuttal but rather a "testament to the virtues of Semantic Web." What we need to be careful about when we talk about metadata, RDF, and all that stuff is to avoid the trap of believing that there will be one set of mketadata tags, one vocabulary, one ontology, for all of us to use. It doesn't work that way. The semantic web isn't about telling us how we must say what we want to say: it's about giving a set of tools that helps us be clear about what we mean, if we want. The semantic web, like the web, isn't a library. It's a conversation.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Nov 21, 2024 11:13 p.m.

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