Pitfalls and Practicalities of Reasoning on the Web

Eric Prud'hommeaux
Schloss Dagstuhl Conference on Rule Markup Techniques
Feb 3 - 8, 2002
Dagstuhl, Germany

Good semantic web design entails following design principals of the conventional web. These principals shape a growing number of semantic web tools integral to W3C's infrastructure. Experience gained from developing these tools has revealed several expected advantages, however, some inconvenient artifacts of web architecture have constrained the design. Creation and use of semantic web data in general requires that one be mindful of these issues.

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Practicalities

Why is the web a good place for logic/inferencing?

• Diversity of data
• Unambiguity of data
• Scalability
• Organic Growth
• Enthusiasm
• Progressive adoption

Pitfalls

• Aggregation from multiple resources
• Trust - Aggregation from unkown resources
• Time - Where logic meets protocols
• Query scaling costs
• Ambiguities between URIs and resources
• Stacking logic

W3C RDF infrastructure

Slides available at:
http://www.w3.org/2001/Talks/1130-dagstuhl-webrules/