Young Service-Oriented Researchers Conference
I gave a paper yesterday in Leicester at YR-SOC 2005, given the somewhat dramatic title of "The Ties that Bind: XML, the Semantic Web, and Web Services"
Here's the slides for those that are truly interested.
Note that I do not use preventing in my slides...even my slides are REST friendly and Web compliant.
My fundamental thesis is that the Web is moving from a "universal information space" to a "universal computation space". To be a universal computation space, you need a universal (i.e. commonly accepted and standardized) way of doing things that one needs to do to actually compute. To compute, one needs state (and a serialization encoding for that state) and functions to transform state, and types for the state . One also might want to distinguish between the semantics of the state that are internal to the computer and those that are about the external world beyond the computer.
What I believe is that XML fundamentally provides the state, Web Services are functions (or at least should appear to be so to end-users!), and the Semantic Web can be used to model the world (ontological typing) while XML Schema can be used to type the state (syntactic typing).
The talk got people quite excited, and I had such witty one-liners as "Reasoning over just XML is like reasoning over ASCII!" and "Let's face it, no one is using the Semantic Web because there's no data out there in RDF, so why not just use XML." I seemed to convince about everyone, and had a great lunch with Stefan Decker. Stefan explained to me some key differences between the original RDF vision (loose data connections) and OWL (strict knowledge modeling, doesn't scale). He also agreed that my vision was good, even if he would prefer people to just exchange straight RDF. Lastly, he made some encouraging comments about his idea of semantic desktop - which is exactly what I want to do for my Ph.D. thesis, show that the Web should be used to organize the locally rich semantic space of everyday users.
Here's the slides for those that are truly interested.
Note that I do not use preventing in my slides...even my slides are REST friendly and Web compliant.
Yours truly at YR-SOC 2005
My fundamental thesis is that the Web is moving from a "universal information space" to a "universal computation space". To be a universal computation space, you need a universal (i.e. commonly accepted and standardized) way of doing things that one needs to do to actually compute. To compute, one needs state (and a serialization encoding for that state) and functions to transform state, and types for the state . One also might want to distinguish between the semantics of the state that are internal to the computer and those that are about the external world beyond the computer.
What I believe is that XML fundamentally provides the state, Web Services are functions (or at least should appear to be so to end-users!), and the Semantic Web can be used to model the world (ontological typing) while XML Schema can be used to type the state (syntactic typing).
Me speaking again, looking rather bedraggled
The talk got people quite excited, and I had such witty one-liners as "Reasoning over just XML is like reasoning over ASCII!" and "Let's face it, no one is using the Semantic Web because there's no data out there in RDF, so why not just use XML." I seemed to convince about everyone, and had a great lunch with Stefan Decker. Stefan explained to me some key differences between the original RDF vision (loose data connections) and OWL (strict knowledge modeling, doesn't scale). He also agreed that my vision was good, even if he would prefer people to just exchange straight RDF. Lastly, he made some encouraging comments about his idea of semantic desktop - which is exactly what I want to do for my Ph.D. thesis, show that the Web should be used to organize the locally rich semantic space of everyday users.
posted by Harry at 8:07 PM
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