Data mining the semantic web? (was RE: [xml-dev] Semantic Web)

7/30/2002 6:29:39 PM, "Joshua Allen" <> wrote:

>That is *exactly* what semantic web is about.  When you do a google
>search, you get the benefit of all of the metadata from *other*
>independent parties.

Hmmm .. that's about the most sensible explanation of the SW as
I've ever seen.  And Google deals with nice referenceable web pages,
not assertions about URIs that may refer to a web page, or they
may refer to abstractions, or may refer to physical objects. :~)

I'm not clear on what the role of RDF, ontologies, etc. would be
in a Google-like semantic web, however.  It would only deal with
these relationships and inferences *statistically* whereas
as I understand it RDF/OWL/etc. attempt to deal with them *logically*.

Or to put it another way, in this view is the semantic web an 
ontology and trust building exercise, or a data mining exercise?