Edd Dumbill’s XML Deviant is always a pleasure to peruse, particularly so in this edition which references Jon Udell and Clay Shirky’s respective reasons for being Semantic Web disbelievers.

Both Shirky and Udell seem to be pretty much convinced the Semantic Web requires, from the outset, globally agreed ontologies. It seems more that they’ve set up a straw man. I had always envisaged that in the same way user interface and other conventions have emerged from the messy web, so would ontological conventions. Messy, but good enough.

There are plenty of ontological figments floating around already. Many will die out, sooner or later. A few will coalesce naturally with others into larger entities, obvious with hindsight. Quite a few will get duct-taped together into ghastly assemblages that everyone will agree to live with until the next round of purist revisionism. Some will stick it out on their own, surviving by filling a niche and satisfying their users. I don’t think there’s much that needs doing to FOAF, for example*.

I imagine we’ll see a certain amount of messy, but good enough, and quite a lot of messy, and not really good enough, but everyone’s using it (and is in denial about how bad it really is) so you’re stuck with it. The latter will, in turn, provoke periodic spasms of purist revisionism - by which yours truly will be duly captivated and enthused. Pass me my Roundhead helmet.

*FOAF is an interesting example, because there’s what seems like a natural fit between the RDF data model and the graphs of social relationships that FOAF tries to model (like an Oxford college scout’s diagram of who’s been sleeping with whom). Whereas I never could see what RDF had to do with syndication…