Re: [topicmaps-comment] RE: OASIS vs W3C

[Bernard Vatant <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>]

[Tony.Coates]

<snip>
... in the "view from 30 000 feet" (or 10 000m) that technology guys 
like Scott and I have to sell to business people (i.e. the ones who 
control the budgets), there is no such clear separation about when 
you might use one or the other.  For many problems, you can see 
how you could use either (and believe me, we have done this 
exercise) ...
</snip>

Although your remarks seem to be grounded in "business common 
sense", I will second Murray's view that those tools have basically 
different purposes. RDF is resource-centered, Topic Maps are 
subject-centered. Full stop. A clear-cut question could be : "do you 
want your information system to be resource-centered, or subject-
centered?"

Too formal question, too academic? Is the difference between 
subjects and resources really too difficult to explain to business 
people even from 30 000 ft? If I deal with products catalog, 
documentation, library or images bank, I would say I'm resource-
centered, but if I deal with KM, Human Resources, Project 
Management, EIP, I would say I'm subject-centered. Maybe your 
examples at Reuters were less clear ...
Have we got so far real communication efforts from the different 
communities to explain that difference clearly anyway? I'm amazed 
to find out that technical tools and standards are so often 
presented in such a technical form seeming to be written only by 
technical people and for exclusive other technical people's use. No 
wonder deciders are lost ...

Another problem is that we've not seen enough full-scale use cases 
by now that anyone could refer to, so it's difficult to answer the 
good old challenge : "Don't explain, show me"

[Tony.Coates]
<snip>
... Nobody wants to tool up and train to use two different 
technologies if they can avoid it.  Nobody can afford to use every 
different technology in every different niche in which it may be the 
"best of breed".  Often the best practical solutions are build around 
using a not-quite-best-of-breed technology that you already have 
experience with ...
</snip>

"The best tool is the tool you know" ... sounds to me like a poor 
old argument in a business world where every other silly tool has 
driven people crazy as long as it was *new*. How did people shift 
from typewriters to computers, from paper mail to e-mail, from local 
files to networks and to cell phones and WAP?
OTOH practical today maybe unsustainable tomorrow. Is it out of 
being practical that enterprises keep on building up that non-
interoperable legacy of billions of MS Word documents which could 
have been written as well as plain html documents through html 
editors easier to use than MS Word (not to speak of XML editors)?

Bottom line. Would not "best practices and benchmarking" 
approaches with more *users* viewpoint be more efficient than 
more technical liaisons and commissions and general architectural 
models and other variants of the Big Picture syndrom?

Regards

Bernard
***********************************
Bernard Vatant - Consultant
bernard.vatant@mondeca.com
Mondeca - "Making Sense of Content"
www.mondeca.com
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