I've just re-read an article penned by Dan Brickley in 1999
titled: The WWW
Proposal and RDF: Then and Now, that retains its prescience to
this very day. Ironically I stumbled across this timeless piece
while revisiting the
RSS name imbroglio that gave us a simple syndication format
(RSS 2.0) that will ultimately implode (IMHO) since "Simple" is
ultimately short lived when dealing with attention challenged
end-users that are always assumed to be dumb when in fact they are
simply ambivalent.
I was compelled to go back to the RSS 2.0 imbroglio when I came
across Dave Winer's
comments re. "the SEC attempting to reinvent RSS 2.0..." response
to Jon
Udell's recent XBRL article.
Although I don't believe in complex entry points into complex
technology realms, I do subscribe to the approach where developers
deal with the complexity associated with a problem domain while
hiding said complexity from ambivalent end-users via coherent
interfaces -- which does not always imply User Interface.
XBRL is a
great piece of work that addresses the complex problem domain of
Financial Reporting. The only thing it's missing right now is an
Ontology that facilitates RDF Data Model based XBRL
Schema and Instance Data which ultimately makes XBRL data available
to RDF query languages such as SPARQL. This line of
thought implies, for instance, an XML Schema to OWL Ontology Mapping for
Schema Data (as explained in a
white paper by the VSIS Group at the university of Hamburg)
leaving the Instance Data to be generated in a myriad of ways that
includes XML to RDF and/or XML->SQL->RDF.
As I stated in an earlier post:
we should not mistake ambivalence to lack of intelligence.
Assuming "Simple" is always right at all times is another way of
subscribing to this profound misconception. You know, assuming the
world was flat (as opposed to geoid) was quite palatable at some
point in the history of mankind, I wonder what would have happened
if we held on to this point of view to this day because of its
"Simplicity"?