The keynote was by Tim Berners-Lee who did a truly awful job in trying to make a connection between web services and the semantic web.
Yup, absolutely agreed. I read over his slides last night, and, like Werner says, was waiting for some new connection to be presented that I also hadn’t considered. But nope. Very disappointing.
I’m pretty sure I know what Tim was trying to do though. He was trying to “embrace and extend” Web services by convincing people that they needed the Semantic Web for data integration, with the expectation that once it is in use, that the need for application-specific interfaces would melt away.
I’m confident that won’t work. For one, if there’s anything that’s held in more contempt by Web services proponents than the Web for app-to-app integration, it’s the Semantic Web. They see it as an academic exercise, and irrelevant to the “needs of business”. Of course that’s wrong, but the belief that it’s true is pervasive in this community. It seems that “the needs of business” has become synonymous with architectural styles that resemble CORBA and DCOM. It is that which needs to be refuted.
It’ll be interesting to see if Tim will keep up this tact when facing the architectural problems with Web services in response to my issue to the TAG.
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