This Is Not About The Semantic Web

Today went to see Ora Lassila defend his Ph.D. thesis, which describes in detail some of his implementations of the specifications of the Semantic Web. Prof. Lynn Andrea Stein did a nice job as opponent and had very good questions about the pros and cons of the choices that Ora had made; choices that every implementer would have to deal with. As befit to the thesis and the Semantic Web they mainly discussed implications of the various possible and actually used knowledge representations. In a sense Ora has tried to augment RDF, but on purpose avoiding making it too rich or too complex.



All in all quite a number of though provoking issues were raised. One thought that came from don't know where was how this would all relate to art. I came to wonder:

• if it would be possible to represent, in RDF or an extension of it, the famous Margritte painting "Ceci n'est pas une pipe"
• what size that graph (description) would be
• and if the graph itself should be treated as an object of art