Comments on: Time For Academic Librarians To Tune In To The Semantic Web

By: Introducing Our New First-Year Academic Librarian Bloggers

Introducing Our New First-Year Academic Librarian Bloggers — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 14:32:11 +0000

[...] Brett Bonfield is a recent grad who currently holds a part-time business librarian position at the University of Pennsylvania and also works part-time in the library systems office at Temple University. We previously published a guest post by Brett that was well received. [...]

By: F.J.Devadason

F.J.Devadason — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 21:43:46 +0000

I do not know whether it is too late “For Academic Librarians To Tune In To The Semantic Web”. I just came across a blog entry given below and thought that it would be of interest to you.
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(”The Semantic Web is Dead”)
May 16, 2007 on 10:24 am | by Mor | In Social Media, General |
Last week, I participated in a WWW2007 panel called “Multimedia Metadata Standards in a Semantic Web 3.0“, where I took the opportunity to declare the Semantic Web dead. As you can imagine, such a declaration in front of a crowd of semantic web researchers provoked many responses. While I believe panels should be provocative and entertaining, I also have specific reasons for why I went as far as calling the Semantic Web “dead”. Let me explain what I mean.

I have been trying to say the same through my write-ups too.
“Facet Analysis and Semantic Web” http://www.geocities.com/devadason.geo/FASEMWEB.html
” WEB IS A FOREST … SEMANTIC WEB A JAPANESE GARDEN ? ” http://www.geocities.com/devadason.geo/SemanticJapaneseGarden.htm
Best regards
Francis Devadason

By: nirak.net - Musings of an LIS Student » LIS students are doing amazing things…

Thu, 24 May 2007 15:23:54 +0000

[...] Another LIS student, Brett Bonfield, has a post on ACRLog called Time For Academic Librarians To Tune In To The Semantic Web, which is a great intro to the semantic web for librarians (it’s neither too technical or too simplistic, a hard balance to strike.) [...]

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 24 May 2007 15:07:31 +0000

I’m not sure I’d agree with the implication that internal W3C problems are what has been holding back RDF and the Semantic Web. One could argue that W3C’s waning influence is a result of it backing some standards that are more complicated than they need to be (for instance, compare W3C’s XML Schema to RELAXNG — fwiw, some would also argue that RDF is another good example of a standard that is too complex for widespread adoption).

I found your references to DocBook interesting in this context though because it has gone the other route (using non-W3C standards like RELAXNG for the newer versions). Btw, thanks for the two DocBook article links… they are very interesting and look similar to Moen’s MCDU work (in that they find out what from the standard is actually being used (but with DocBook instead of MARC)).

All that said, I do think there has been a recent surge in interest in the library community for RDF stuff.